Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations: Interregionalism and Transnationalism between Latin America and Europe

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Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations

This book seeks to develop our understanding of the contemporary geopolitical reconfigurations of two regions of the world system with high cultural affinity and traditional close relations: Latin America and Europe. Relations between Latin America and Europe have been interpreted generally in the social sciences as synonyms of interstate relations. ­However, although states remain the most important actor in the geopolitical scene, they have been deeply reconfigured in recent decades, impacted by ­transnational dynamics, politics and spaces. This book highlights interregional relations and transnational dynamics between Latin America and Europe from a critical geopolitics perspective, promoting a new look for ­interregional relations which encompasses international cooperation and development, global ­policies, borders, inequalities and social movements. It brings attention to the relevance of interregionalism in the current geopolitical reconfiguration of the world system but also argues for systematic inclusion of relevant new social actors and imaginaries in this traditional sphere of states. These social actors, particularly social movements and practices of contestation, are developing not only “international” bonds but a new “transnational” field, where networks defy traditional territorial orders. This volume seeks to generate a new discussion among scholars of geopolitics, international relations, social theory and social movement studies by encouraging a development of an interregional and transnational perspective of the two regions. Heriberto Cairo is a professor in Political Sciences in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he has been dean of the Faculty of Political ­Science and Sociology. He has published extensively in geopolitics, peace and conflict studies and Latin American integration process. Breno Bringel is a professor at the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the Rio de Janeiro State University, where he coordinates the PhD Program in Sociology. He has published extensively in social movements, transnational activism and Latin American thought.

Routledge Studies in Global and Transnational Politics Series Series editors: Chris Rumford, Sandra Halperin Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

The core theme of the series is “global connectivities” and the implications and outcomes of global and transnational processes in history and in the contemporary world. The series aims to promote greater theoretical innovation and interdisciplinarity in the academic study of global transformations. The understanding of globalization that it employs accords centrality to forms and processes of political, social, cultural and economic connectivity (and disconnectivity) and relations between the global and the local. The series’ editors see the multidisciplinary exploration of “global connectivities” as contributing, not only to an understanding of the nature and direction of current global and transnational transformations but also to recasting the intellectual agenda of the social sciences. The series aims to publish high-quality work by leading and emerging scholars critically engaging with key issues in the study of global and transnational politics. It will comprise research monographs, edited collections and advanced textbooks for scholars, researchers, policy analysts and students. Rethinking Ideology in the Age of Global Discontent Bridging Divides Edited by Barrie Axford, Didem Buhari-Gulmez and Seckin Baris Gulmez Egyptian Diaspora Activism During the Arab Uprisings Insights from Paris and Vienna Lea Müller-Funk Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations Interregionalism and Transnationalism Between Latin America and Europe Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Global-and-Transnational-Politics/book-series/ RSGTP

Critical Geopolitics and Regional (Re)Configurations Interregionalism and Transnationalism between Latin America and Europe Edited by Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-61533-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46318-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

In memory of David Slater, colleague and friend, who began this travel with us. “There will always be the need for a negotiation of respect and recognition with a critical spirit that helps us avoid essentializations of either positive or negative hue. A meaningful ethics of intersubjectivity would include the right to be critical and different on both sides of any ‘cultural border’. And the future can be post-imperial; another world is possible” (David Slater, Geopolitics and the Post-colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 233).

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements Foreword: “Latin” America and former “south/western Europe” in the world (dis) order

x xi xii xiv

1

Wa lt e r D. M ignol o

Introduction: the geopolitics of interregionalism and transnationalism

7

H e r i be rt o Ca i ro a n d Br e no Br i nge l

Part I

Latin America and Europe in the contemporary worldsystem: imperiality, domination and cooperation

23

1 Interventionism, invasiveness and the geopolitics of the imperial: in search of the pathways of power

25

Dav i d Sl at e r

2 Social liberalism and global domination: lessons for Latin America and Europe

49

Jo sé M au r íc io D om i ngu e s

3 Euro-Latin American interregionalism in the new post-Cold War geopolitical order H e r i be rt o Ca i ro

63

viii Contents PART II

Geopolitical imaginaries and socio-territorial orders in Latin America and Europe

77

4 European models, Latin American cases: Eurocentrism and the contentious politics of state formation

79

PE DRO D O S SA N T O S DE B OR BA

5 Forgotten Europes: rethinking regional entanglements from the Caribbean

96

M A N U E L A B OAT CĀ

6 Geopolitical narratives of an “accommodating” state in the face of “low geopolitics”: the Marca España and attracting Multilatina investment

117

RO SA DE L A F U E N T E A N D R E NAT O L . P. M I R A N DA

7 Beyond the “lettered border”: towards a comparative horizon in European and Latin American border studies

131

OL I V I E R T HOM A S K R A M S C H

8 Beyond a regional gaze? Orders, borders and modern geopolitical imaginations in Europe and Latin America

145

M A R Í A L OI S

PART III

(Inter)regionalism from below: social actors, pedagogies and transnational practices

159

9 Interregionalism from below: cultural affinity, translation and solidarities in the Ibero-American space

161

BR E NO BR I NGE L A N D H E R I BE RT O CA I RO

10 The new cycle of women’s mobilizations between Latin America and Europe: a feminist geopolitics perspective on interregionalism A L M U DE NA CA BE Z A S G ON Z Á L E Z A N D GA BR I E L A PI N H E I RO M AC H A D O BRO C H N E R

178

Contents  ix 11 New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities: Mexico inside Barcelona, from Zapatistas to Indignados

197

L I V I A A L CA N TA R A A N D BR E NO BR I NGE L

Epilogue: Latin Americanization of Europe: possibilities for a geopolitical pedagogical transformation

213

T E I VO T E I VA I N E N

Index

223

Figures

    5.1 M  ap of the EU overseas countries and territories and outermost regions 2015 99     5.2 EU’s colonies on Euro banknotes 101     5.3 Map of the EU enlargement 2004 103     5.4 Map of the Caribbean with its European and US-American colonial possessions 107     5.5 Europe with current Western borders in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean 110     5.6 Anguilla’s European borders 114 10.1 Places where the women’s strike of 2016 took place 183 10.2 Places where the women’s strike of 2017 took place 184 10.3 Places where the women’s strike of 2018 took place 185 10.4 “Utero tropical”: campaign No pasarán by Red Federica Montseny 186 10.5 “My body, my rights: a global fight. Freedom for las 17” 187

Tables

5.1 Multiple Europes 104

Contributors

Livia Alcantara has a PhD in Sociology from the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Activist and Journalist, she works at Operação Amazônia Nativa (OPAN), the first indigenist organization founded in Brazil. Manuela Boatcă  is a professor of Sociology with a focus on macrosociology at the Institut für Soziologie & Global Studies Programme, Albert-­ Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Pedro dos Santos de Borba has a PhD in Political Science from the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and is a researcher at the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos (IESP), Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Breno Bringel is a professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos (IESP), Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Gabriela Pinheiro Machado Brochner  has a PhD in Political Science and Master in Latin American Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Almudena Cabezas-González  is a lecturer in Political Geography at the ­Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Heriberto Cairo  is a professor of Political Geography at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. José Maurício Domingues  is a professor of Sociology at the Instituto de ­Estudos Sociais e Políticos (IESP), Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rosa de la Fuente  is a lecturer in Political geography, urban policies and local governance at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, ­Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

Contributors  xiii Olivier Thomas Kramsch  is a professor of Geography and Border Studies at the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR), Department of ­Human Geography, Radboud Universiteit, Netherlands. María Lois is a lecturer in Political Geography at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Walter D. Mignolo is the William Hane Wannamaker professor of Romance Studies and director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities in Duke University, USA. Renato L. P. Miranda is a lecturer in Public Law and Public Administration at the Public Administration Course, Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil. David Slater as an emeritus professor of Political Geography at the University of Loughborough, United Kingdom. Teivo Teivainen is a professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Acknowledgements

The origin of this book was based on two seminars held with the financial support of the Secretaría de Estado de Educación, Formación Profesional y Universidades of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES) of the Brazilian Ministry of Education, under the programme of inter-university cooperation between Brazil and Spain. The first seminar, “Geopolitical Re-configurations and Global Modernity: Latin America and Europe in comparative perspective” (Spanish Ref. PHB2012-0032-TA and Brazilian Ref. 311/13) was held in Madrid on 16 and 17 December 2013. Few months later, on 24 and 25 April 2014, the second one, entitled “Geopolitical Reconfigurations and Regional Transformations: Dialogues between Europe and Latin America” (­Spanish Ref. PHB2012-0031-TA and Brazilian Ref. 311/13), was held in Rio de Janeiro. Some colleagues who participated in the seminars could not, for different reasons, write their texts for the book. Others, even though they had not originally participated in the seminars, engaged enthusiastically in the book proposal afterwards. We thank all of them for their contribution and dialogue. In more substantive terms, the project is part of a long-term cooperation between the Research Group on Space and Power of the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the Research Group on Social Theory and Latin America, based at the Institute of Political and Social Studies of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Certainly, the discussions of both groups (and between them) are strongly present in several chapters of the book, and we want to thank all the members of both groups for their implication and support in very different ways. The institutional support of the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the Institute of Political and Social Studies of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro has been very important for the seminars and the project of the book in general.

Acknowledgements  xv We would also like to thank the five anonymous readers of the proposal of this book for their helpful comments and critiques, which have undoubtedly improved the final product. Lastly, a special recognition for Ella Halstead, our editorial assistant in Routledge (Taylor and Francis), always so supportive and sympathetic. Her assistance has been very valuable.

Foreword “Latin” America and former “south/western Europe” in the world (dis) order Walter D. Mignolo I Editors and contributors to this volume explore the contemporary geopolitics of interregionalism and transnationalism of two regions of the world system with “cultural affinities and traditional relations”. There are a few points that I would like to underscore in this preface, reading the past in the present, ­starting by writing modern/colonial world system and writing “Latin” America in quotation marks. The reason is that “Latin” America is the political ­project of people of European descent that settled in the sub-continent since the sixteenth century and obscured other important dimensions, that of Pueblos Originarios that today inhabit Abya Yala and Afro-descendent, whom today inhabit La Gran ­Comarca (Mignolo, 2005). The cultural affinities are due to the colonial histories of Western Europe (Spain, Portugal, England, France) and significant migratory contingents from Italy since the second half of the n ­ ineteenth century that populated, mainly, the Atlantic coast from ­Buenos Aires to New York. However, relations (interstate, international-interregional and transnational) between Europe and “Latin” America imply all of the above ­relations between two geopolitical (also historical and economic) “entities”. The quotation marks around “entities” is because both Europe and “Latin” America are not ontic land masses named as such when planet earth came into being, but they are historical and political imaginary constructions. What that means is that the land, people, river, trees, animals, grass, sand, etc., that compose the materiality of the land masses so named, are indeed mapped and appropriated in the very act of naming, but the actors, institutions and languages in which they are named. As for “Europe”, that I also write in quotation marks and I would say – without entering into detailed argument in this prefatory observation – t­ aking into account what we know about Greek mythology from where the name was derived, that “Europe” named a sector of a vast continent also known as “Eurasia” that previously was known as “Western Christendom”. There is a parallel here in the historical reconfigurations of regions between Europe and Eurasia and Latin America and America. The coming into being of “Europe” has much to do with the coming into being of “America” (see Chapters 2 and 4). And I mean America, which includes

2  Walter D. Mignolo the United States. They have been mutually constituted since the sixteenth century. Both entities were entangled in the European imagination. To the inhabitants of Anahuac, Ayiti, Tawantinsuyu, Abya Yala, Walmapu, Turtle ­Island, etc., “America” meant anything. It was an entity and a continent only in Western Christian/European imagination. What this means is that the interregional and transnational (although “national” before 1750 means something different to what it meant for the creation of ethno-bourgeois n ­ ation-states) relations between the constitution of Europe since 1500 and the constitution of America since 1504 are entangled by a power differential: the epistemic and ontological colonial power differential constitutive of the modern/colonial world system. The modern world system without the slash highlighting the colonial difference is only half of the story: the Euro-centred half of the story disguising the darker side of its modernity, that is, coloniality. In 1504, Martin Waldseemüller had the brilliant idea of ignoring the names that the diversity of Pueblos Originarios has given to their own territory and named the continent “America” after – as we know – Italian navigator Américo Vespucci. But he had also the brilliant idea of ignoring what he must have known: that for the Spanish Crown it was not “America” the territory Europeans began to plunder, but “Indias Occidentales”. Consequently, and from the beginning, any kind of relations between Europe and America have been and are epistemologically founded. That is, the two entities are imaginary constructions upon which geopolitical relations have been built. Not only materially (people and goods crossing the Atlantic). All material relations are packaged in well-crafted narratives making you believe that the entities so named have been there always. Believing in what “there is” hides how historically the entities “came to be”. The first is the illusion managed by the rhetoric of modernity. The second reveals the power relations in the coming into being of entities taken for granted in their existence, without questioning their becoming. Which are crucial questions to understanding the constant mobility of interregional and transnational relations in the forming and transforming of the modern/colonial world system. Hence, it should be remembered that there is no “Latin” America in ­anybody’s mind until the second half of the nineteenth century. To say that once the name “Latin” America has been introduced and accepted by the French instigators, motivators and promoters, it “applies” retrospectively and so it can be said, as it is not rare to read or hear, that “Columbus discovered Latin America” or publishing a volume or having panels in conferences about “Latin America Colonial History”, is nonsense embodied in everybody’s mind, to use an oxymoronic expression. “Latin” America is an invention of transnational relations between officers of the secular French State, and officers of some of the Republics (or nation-states formation) managed by the Creole elites in South America. Thus, it is in the very name, not in the entity, that interregions are constituted and transnational relations (once the modern and modern/colonial states were instituted). In the transforming world order of the mid-nineteenth century, France noticed the emerging rivalry of the United States moving dangerously (from France’s

The world (dis) order  3 perspective) much to the South. By the Treaty Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), the United States disposed Mexico of vast territories, a region that France considered part of its “Latinity” after taking over the geopolitical configuration of Indias Occidentales (Spanish possessions) and Brazil (Portugal possessions) implanted over the territories expropriated to the First Nations.

II From 1500 to 1800, the Americas (including the United States) have been demographically formed by three large and diverse ethnic configurations. The First Nations, from today’s South of Chile and Argentina to Alaska and Canada; the non-invited migrants settled across the continent, from ­Western Europe, from the Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal) to Western Europe (France, England, Holland) (see Chapter 1). And third, the forced migrations of enslaved human beings from West Africa. When the legal end of enslaved trade that converted human lives into commodities arrived to its legal closure, indentured labour began to attract a population from China and India since the first half of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution changed the means of navigation from ships propelled by the wind to the steamboat propelled by extracted “natural resources”. Of larger capacity, the steamboat accelerated people’s mobility. Ports were the points of arrival and departure while the railroad and the locomotive transported people inside the continent. So that in the second half of the nineteenth century, France lobbied the local Creole elites who were building nations-states (republics) over the ruins of former Spanish Viceroyalties to name themselves “Latin” Americans, the geopolitics of regionalism and transnationalism was operating on the transformation of the imperial and colonial differences. In Europe, state politics in France was securing the leadership of the ­Southern, the Latin Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy) and, in the Americas, France was securing the management and ascendency of former Iberian colonies: now “Latin” America and no longer “Spanish/Luso America” (see ­Chapter  2). Simultaneously, France was securing the imperial difference with the South of Europe and the colonial difference with the South of the Rio Grande: Latin America in the South and Anglo America in the North (United States and part of Canada). While France was managing the politics of naming and identification, England was quietly managing the economy by the power of the sea (steamboat) and the power of the land (railroad) transporting natural resources from inland to the ports and from there to London. The re-ordering of Europe after the Great Revolution (1688) and the French Revolution (1789) redefined the geopolitics of regionalism and transnationalism. As a matter of fact, there is no “nationalism” properly speaking until the leadership of the emerging bourgeoisie in the North/West region of Europe and the advent of the nation-state replacing the monarchic states. It all began to change towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. On the one hand, the consolidation of the idea (for it is nothing more than an idea with legal/political backing it up) of the

4  Walter D. Mignolo Western Hemisphere mean the consolidation of the United States and, on the other hand, the defeat of the Hispano-American War in 1898, secured the conditions of the (Anglo, United States) Western Hemisphere moving South (see Chapter 4). The Hispano-American War was a turning point in the geopolitics of the world (dis) order, interregionalism and transnationalism. It was a signpost of the entrance of the United States as a new strong world player in the North Atlantic and in the reconfiguration of “Latin” American States. For the United States after dispossessing Mexico of vast territory, moved decisively into the Caribbean and Central America and in Argentina, displaced the economic hegemony that England enjoyed until the first decades of the twenties centuries. The Hispano-American War triangulated decisively the regionalism and transnationalism in the Atlantic, North and South. The South of Europe, outlined by Kant and Hegel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, consolidated the South of the North, that is still at work in the constitution of the European Union: Portugal, Spain, Italy are the lesser members of the family. Greece was added to the geopolitics of the South of the North, although it was not among the “Latin” countries. On its part, the South of the Americas became a “double South”: the poor member of the South of Europe’s former imperial family (Spain and Portugal) and “Latin” America, increasingly under the political, economic and cultural insertion of “Anglo” America. Relevant for the theme of this book is the following: Global South is a substitute for Third World after the end of the Cold War (see Chapters 3 and 8). With one addition, the South of Europe was not part of the Third World but it is of the Global South. So that Spain and Portugal, members of the Global South benefit from imperial memories that do not have the rest of the Global South regions. On the other hand, Brazil was the Portugal Royal House during the nineteenth century. However, contrary to Portugal, Brazil was counted as one of the Third World countries. After the end of the Cold War, Brazil was for a while a powerful member of BRICS country, a privilege that vanished after the judicial coup to remove Dilma Rousseff from the presidency.

III H. Cairo and B. Bringel open the introduction with this statement: This book aims at understanding the contemporary geopolitical reconfigurations of two regions of the world system with high cultural affinity and traditional close relations: Latin America and Europe. My prefatory comments intended to outline the long-lasting histories underlying the current and “contemporary geopolitical configurations” of two regions of the world system. Contemporary reconfigurations, analysed in detail in the chapters composing the book, are better understood if we look into the past in the present and above all, if we pay attention to two decisive

The world (dis) order  5 strategies in the constitution of the modern/colonial world system: imperial and colonial differences. Neither of them existed, having been created by some non-human designs and forces that human discovered. Imperial and colonial differences were “made”. Their making did not require physical labour, but intellectual labour: they were and still are the consequences of epistemic world making of actors, institutions and languages that are in a position to create and manage knowledge. “Latin” American actors and institutions were complicit with their sub-continental identification, but it was neither their idea nor their design. The colonial difference was already there when the United States redefined it: “Latin” America became a sector of underdeveloped countries under Harry Truman’s idea and ideology of development. On the other hand, the contemporary geopolitical configuration of the EU has been built on the already existing intramural imperial difference: the former empires of the North (France and England) looking down to the former empires of the South (Spain and Portugal). Relevant to the contemporary configuration of the two regions are the increasing presence of the emerging “global political society” (social movements in the terminology of the social sciences), analysed in the last part of this book. The global political society emerges from the civil society but supersedes it. It is constituted by hundreds of visible and invisible political organizations at the margin of State politics and with its back to it. The ­Zapatistas (see Chapter 11) are an early example, but today, the two major ethnic demographic constituency of “Latin” America are up in epistemic arms redefining themselves and redefining their territoriality: Abya Yala, in the language and epistemology of the First Nations and La Gran Comarca, has been reducing “Latin” America to size and indirectly evincing the “Latin” America is not a sub-continent but the political project of the Creole elite in complicity with France in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ethno-racial configurations implicit in the making of colonial differences and in the identification of First Nations and Afro-descendent is a configuration made in Europe, reproduced in the United States, and accepted with advantages by the governing population of European descent. ­Racism, in other words, works at two levels: the Euro-American racialization of “Latin” America and the racialization of “Latin” American themselves projected over the First Nations and Afro-descendent. The colonial difference is at work in the emergence of “feminismo comunitario” (Cabnal, 2010) in the Andes and Southern Mexico/Guatemala, of Afro-feminismo (­Montaño Ortiz, 2018) and feminismo decolonial (Montanaro Mena, 2017) (see ­Chapter 10). Last but not least, the increasing presence of LatinX (Hispanics, Latinxs and Chicanxs) in the United States collapses the interstate geopolitical division between the Latin South of Bolivar and the Anglo North of Jefferson (see Chapter  6). ­Dialogues between European feminisms and South American feminisms proved to be difficult from radical differential histories charged with racial differentials and local histories: the embedded memories of imperial Europe and embedded memories of colonial histories in South America cannot be

6  Walter D. Mignolo brought together under the pretence of “universal feminism”. The imperial/ colonial differences have to be undone, which is not an easy task. Emotions do not correspond, most of the time, with public policies. The crossing of race and sexuality has been expanded to the growing manifestations in words and deeds of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. The political society is not operating as a branch of the State, sometimes, not even addressing the State, but their goals are dominated by the force and desire of re-existing more than in resisting; in learning to be and, in the First Nations vocabulary, healing the wounds inflicted by the colonial difference. The “cultural affinities” with Europe of these regional unfolding would have to be mapped. Perhaps the emerging immigrant cultures and consciousness, in Europe, would find “cultural affinities” with the unfolding of the emerging political society activated in the territories of Pueblos Originarios and Afro-South American, neither of them properly “Latin”. And neither the Native Americas nor the First Nations in Canada are in the Global South. However, their horizons of living, be it Sumak Kamaña and Suma ­Qamaña in the Andes (see Huanacuni Mamani, 2011) or Mino ­Bimaadiziwin in the Nishnaabeg in Canada (see Simpson, 2011). Furthermore, the ­Afro-­reconceptualization of their territoriality in South America as “La Gran Comarca” further reduces “Latin” America to size, limiting it to the population of European descent (Walsh and García Zalazar, 2015).

References Cabnal, Lorena (2010) “Acercamiento a la construcción de la propuesta de pensamiento epistémico de las mujeres indígenas feministas comunitarias de Abya Yala.” In Feminismos diversos: el feminismo comunitario. Madrid: ACSUR – Las Segovias, 10–25. [On line. Available at: https://porunavidavivible.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/feminismos-comunitario-lorena-cabnal.pdf. Accessed on: 16 ­October 2018]. Huanacuni Mamani, Fernando (2011) Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien. Filosofía, políticas, estrategias y experiencias regionales andinas. La Paz: Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas. [On line. Available at: https://www.escr-net.org/sites/ default/files/Libro%20Buen%20Vivir%20y%20Vivir%20Bien_0.pdf. Accessed on: 23 October 2018]. Mignolo, Walter D. (2005) The Idea of Latin America. London: Blackwell. Montanaro Mena, Ana Marcela (2017) Una mirada al feminismo decolonial en América Latina. Madrid: Dykinson. Montaño Ortiz, Lisa María (2018) “El feminismo también es afro.” Afroféminas. [On line: 13 March 2018. Available at: https://afrofeminas.com/2018/03/13/el-­ feminismo-tambien-es-afro/. Accessed on: 16 October 2018]. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake (2011) Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Re-Surgence and New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Walsh, Catherine, and García Zalazar, Juan (2015) “Memoria colectiva, escritura y estado. Prácticas pedagógicas de existencia afroecuatorianas.” Cuadernos de Literatura, vol. XIX, no. 38, 79–98.

Introduction The geopolitics of interregionalism and transnationalism Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel

This book aims at understanding the contemporary geopolitical reconfigurations of two regions of the world system with high cultural affinity and traditional close relations: Latin America and Europe. Relations between Latin America and Europe have been interpreted generally in the social sciences as synonyms of interstate relations. Although states are still the most important actors in the geopolitical scene, they are deeply reconfigured in recent decades. They were overflowed by transnational dynamics, politics and spaces. Moreover, supranational arenas and social actors are playing an important role in shaping world history and global and regional politics. In the different chapters, the authors have tried to highlight interregional relations between Latin America and Europe from a critical geopolitics perspective. The main aim is contribute to promote a new look for interregional relations between both regions from the emerging perspectives of transnational and global studies, including different areas and subjects, such as international cooperation and development, global policies, borders, inequalities and social movements. On the one hand, it brings attention to the relevance of interregionalism in the current geopolitical reconfiguration of the world system. On the other hand, it argues for systematic inclusion of ­relevant new social actors and imaginaries in this traditional sphere of states. These social actors, particularly social movements and practices of contestation, are developing not only “international” bonds but a new “transnational” field, where networks defy traditional territorial orders: migrants, activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) establish new and strong networks and phenomena such as the “outrage” movement spread along countries and continents during the last decade. Latin America and Europe have a history of entanglement and mutual constitution in modernity. Geopolitical analysis and theories of modernity have drawn attention to it, but have tended to incur in three serious problems. The first, already mentioned, is to restrict the relationship between both regions to the interaction between states and their devices (foreign policy, war and taxation, for instance) and actors (diplomacy, official representatives, bureaucracy, etc.). The second limit lies in an interpretation of

8  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel an unfinished modernity in Latin America which, compared with Europe, often appears as backward and underdevelopment. In this teleological and Eurocentric view, Europe emerges in several interpretations as a mirror for Latin America. Finally, a third problematic view complements the previous one. It is an essentially negative view of the relationship between the two regions, in which only the violence of modernity and its consequences are emphasized: colonialism, imperialism, dependency, marginalities, poverty, violence and so on. Furthermore, traditional regional studies are focused on one region of the world, but the interregional studies are much less prominent in the scholarly literature. Although the paradigms and theories which were developed for the study of individual regions are partially applicable to interregional studies, it is necessary to develop new insights to analyse this complex and overlapped reality. In view of these limitations of the debate, this volume seeks to generate a new discussion among scholars of geopolitics, international relations, social theory and social movement studies by encouraging them to not only incorporate a comparative analysis of Latin America and Europe situation but also to develop an interregional and transnational perspective of the two regions. This requires a multidimensional look, combining different methodologies that are able to identify the connectivities and examine, in a dialectical perspective, both relations of power and domination in space and time as well as actors, practices and imaginaries of mutual articulation and resistance. Hence, the focus in the processes of social, political and cultural connection allows us to address in a key perspective of transnational dynamics often not emphasized in International Relations, mainstream ­Geopolitics, International Political Economy and Regional Studies.

Geopolitics of interregionalism: regions in geopolitical orders A definition of geopolitical order may seem easy given that most authors agree that this is a period of time when relationships between the actors in the interstate system are relatively stable or at least abide to guidelines which are stable. But differences start to appear if we delve a bit more deeply and aim at greater accuracy (Cairo, 2008a). When working on the world geopolitical order, Taylor and Flint (2000) start from the idea that even when the geopolitical codes of each country are created independently from each other, those of the most relevant actors are more important, to the point that they manage to fit in all, so that one sole general guideline is reached: world geopolitical orders. It is worth noting that – according to these authors – the existence of a world geopolitical order is not possible without a dominant power. Agnew and Corbridge (1995) interpret geopolitical orders in a different way. They see them as constituted by the set of rules, institutions, activities and strategies which become routine in each historical period and which

Interregionalism and transnationalism  9 have certain geographical characteristics. These geopolitical orders are sustained through coercive or consensual power relations but they do not necessarily imply the existence of a dominant power as material practices and “hegemonic” representations are largely already regarded as common sense. The geopolitical orders in Agnew and Corbridge (1995) are Gramscian in inspiration. Here, a hegemonic way of representation would be imposed, inspired – or not – by one hegemonic power though not necessarily imposed by force. Thus, they identify three geopolitical orders since the nineteenth century: the “Concert of Europe British geopolitical order” (1815–1875), the “inter-imperialist rivalry geopolitical order” (1875–1945) and the “Cold War geopolitical order” (1945–1990). The end of the Cold War would mark a new geopolitical order. States are not the only actors in the geopolitical orders. On a smaller scale, we find geopolitical regions. The Dictionary of Geopolitics by Yves Lacoste includes the following definition of these entities: a spatial array (more or less large) which nominates the common characteristics or the relations, including conflictual ones, of a more or less large number of states with common interests which are eager to affirm their solidarity or to promote exchanges. (Giblin-Delvallet, 1993: 1264–1265) But the definition of a geopolitical region is inevitably linked to the integration processes. As indicated elsewhere (Cairo, 2003), these regions are spatial constructs designed to meet the challenges of globalization and thus regionalization and globalization remain inextricably linked (Niemann, 1998). After Second World War, economic growth was initially and fundamentally based on mass consumption expansion in the most industrialized countries, which encouraged production growth and consequently trade between these countries. These had negative consequences for periphery countries as a whole but it boosted in some countries the development of new, export-oriented industrialization models as opposed to the import substitution models typical of previous times. The globalization of production, together with an increase in trade flows and investment between long-term and new industrialized countries, eventually undermined the geographical concentration of production processes and mass consumption. After Second World War, the oldest and most developed industrialized countries had to ever more frequently adjust their relationship with the world economy through informal methods of economic coordination. However, some attempts were made to return to even out production and consumption by means of creating units larger than the states, which were now incapable of regulating these processes. This was the beginning of new regionalism. For Niemann (2000: 134), the Fordism’s crisis implied – at least to some extent – states’ incapacity to control interest rates and capital flows. Given

10  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel that the very logic inherent to the mode of production prevents capital from organizing itself to control these flows, and the creation of a global state is not an alternative – as capitalist accumulation requires the existence of different political units to take advantage of different environments in order to maximize accumulation (Taylor and Flint, 2000), the conditions are such that the social production of a spatial layer broader than the state is possible. Quoting Niemann, [R]egionalization must first and foremost be seen as the outcome of multiple efforts to create a regulatory regime at the regional level, a spatial scale which can potentially overcome the limitation of the state scale and, at the same time, can provide the advantages of a specific, bounded location which can capture within a larger space at least those aspects of global accumulation which continue to be concentrated in that space (2000: 136). Interregionalism is, in part, an answer to the same problem. But it is also an instrument to fight for supremacy in the centre of the world system, and to gain autonomy in the periphery of it. From the point of view of the fight for supremacy, the strategic use of the alliances between regions in the ­twenty-first century is not very different to the use of imperialist domination in the nineteenth century. Hettne and Söderbaum (2005: 549) showed that European Union (EU)’s foreign policy relations are a mixture of civilian power, linked to interregionalism, and soft imperialism: The former implies a foreign policy built on the norms promoted internally within the Union and on voluntary dialogue and consensus-­building with the counterpart. The latter refers to an asymmetric relationship, and the imposition of norms in order to promote the EU’s self-interest. However, moral geographies of traditional imperialism and interregionalism are quite different: the subaltern Other, reduced to be a slave in the imperialist geopolitical orders, is able to look straight at the eyes of the master and negotiate better terms in their relation, that, although asymmetric in power, gives more autonomy to the peripheral side (Cairo, 2008b). One of the first references to “interregionalism” in the academic data bases is in a paper written by Sánchez Bajo (1999) about the relations between the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR for its Spanish initials) and the EU. There, we find an early exploration of what was then a new reality, which leaded to the author to point out that “in an inter-regional relation, new elements enter the analysis beyond trade and investment and socioeconomic and governmental actors’ interests” (Sánchez Bajo, 1999: 927). That is to say that interregionalism is much more than merely creating a bigger free trade area. The date of the paper is not a casualty, there is no interregionalism before the end of the cold war, probably for two reasons: on the one side, in

Interregionalism and transnationalism  11 that bipolar world there was not much room for establishing independent partnerships between regions ignoring the two main geopolitical field, and, on the other, in the post-Cold War era the globalization process speeded up the necessity for a new division of the world outside the central “triad” (United States, the EU and Japan), and to develop interregionalism inside it (Link, 2006). The concept of interregionalism is fuzzy and multifaceted (Rüland, Hänggi and Roloff, 2006). Usually, interregionalism is explored based on the EU experience and its relations with other regional groups, like in Telò, ­Fawcett and Ponjaert (2015). Gardini and Malamud (2018) in a detailed recent revision of the notion arrive to the conclusion that in order to transcend the most obvious definition – “relations among regions at the international level” (Gardini, 2018: xii) – it is important to distinguish several subtypes. Then, they proceed to expand the typology of Hänggi (2006): pure interregionalism (“relations between regional groupings”), transregionalism (­ “arrangements where the states participate in an individual capacity”), hybrid interregionalism (“relations between regional groupings and single powers”), overlapping interregionalism (relations between “regional organizations that share members”) and stealth interregionalism (when the relations are tight but not institutionalized, like in the cases of currency integration of African states with the Euro or Latin American states with the dollar). Furthermore, interregionalism, in the same way as regionalism, does not refer solely to inter-government relations; it also includes those more diverse relations of civil society, which at times take place connectedly but which have become more and more independent. That is, even when it is essentially about an agreement between states, the civil society in these states soon establishes connections. While it is true that some of these connections are more characteristic of transnationalism, there are some connections that are specifically interregional. However, in spite of the commonalities between regionalism and interregionalism, there are differences between them. One of the main and obvious divergences, as it is underlined by Molano-Cruz (2017: 22), is that interregionalisms do not become institutionalized, that is, they are not legal entities: “Interregionalism is an space of debate and negotiation of numerous issues where the connections of interdependence originated in the global economic integration materialise […] [It is] a space of world political governance”. Finally, it should be borne in mind that geopolitical regions are normally associated with certain spatial representations promoted by the state actors who build them. The same applies to interregionalism: it is constructed through discourses that make the relationship intelligible. Obviously, different interregions can share general principles (multilateralism, pacifism, equitable relations, etc.), but usually the associated geopolitical discourse will focus on different characteristics: for example, the idea of “strategic association”, typical of interregionalism, is related in each case with different geopolitical narratives.

12  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel

Geopolitics of transnationalism: connections, scales and multiple spatialities Beyond interregional processes, critical geopolitics has also been challenged by transnational dynamics and processes, which reveal contemporary ­socio-spatial complexity. For a long time, most analyses in social sciences and in area studies tended to privilege not only the nation-state as already mentioned but also a specific spatiality (Leitner, Sheppard and Sziarto, 2008). However, this trend has been progressively challenged after the deep societal changes of the post-Cold War world. Indeed, the new geopolitical order inaugurated after the fall of the Berlin Wall is marked by space-time articulations that affect our conceptions, experiences and senses of place (Massey, 1994) as well as cultural and social connections outside fixed borders. At the same time, it conditions and is conditioned by current acceleration in different levels: individual, cultural/social and technological (Rosa, 2015). Among critical geographers that did not accept homogenizing globalophilic theses, the initial emphasis has been placed on the politics of scales, while among sociologists and political scientists with spatial sensitivity, ­networks and territories have been, in general terms, the privileged ­categories. This choice is guided in most cases by an analytical and ontological ­criterion, due to the difficulty of crossing the different spatialities involved. However, this kind of analytical operation reduces the heuristic potential by offering a partial view of the relevance of space in the social sciences and in the current world. Thus, the key question is to pay attention to the relevance of particular spatialities in specific contexts, but also to their co-implication, which does not simply mean a co-presence of spatialities, but how each of them affects the others, influencing the trajectory and the construction of cultural, economic and socio-political dynamics and spaces beyond borders. This is what we would like to call geopolitics of transnationalism. The transnational is not a scale or something between national and global, but mainly a perspective. It is a concrete way of looking (and opening) the world (Hannerz, 1996), questioning preconceived territorial units. ­Geopolitics of transnationalism considers scales not simply as different spheres or levels of analysis where the social actors act within what Brenner (1999: 46) calls “methodological territorialism”, but as social constructions that are permeable to cognitive, physical and material displacements from people, ideas and objects. For this reason, it is crucial to understand places in their territorial and relational dimension (Bringel, 2015). On the one hand, this implies difficulties of finding spaces of exteriority in localities. Also, the limits of analysing “the national” without paying attention to the flows and interconnections that links it to other scales and power relations. The naturalization that has been done until very recently of the nation-state as a prefixed territoriality – and not as a specific historical process, always contradictory and conflictive – has contributed enormously

Interregionalism and transnationalism  13 to this scale bias. On the other hand, this means that the actors carry out diagnoses, elaborate conceptions of reality and structure their social interactions geographically on different scales that are constructed by them from a series of internal and external elements, micro and macro. As pointed out by Khagram and Levitt (2008), transnational studies encompass discourses, material flows and cultural interactions that are produced and exchanged across borders. It is concerned about what circulates, how it moves, and with explaining why certain ideas and practices take root while others are ignored. That is why the relationship between territories and scales is always mediated by networks and dynamics of diffusion. This helps us to explain that certain social practices are not repeated elsewhere only by a “snowball effect” or by contagion, but rather that there are certain socio-spatial dynamics that stimulate (and in some restrict) this diffusion. Transnationalism as a concept and as a practice is previous to the postCold War world. Bourne (1916) was one of the first to use the term “transnational” to refer, in the middle of First World War and against the domination of naturalist geopolitics, to the impossibility of understanding world relations only in terms of nation-states. Bourne was interested in visualizing the relations between cultures (particularly between North American and European) that would lead to new forms of pluralism to the detriment of isolation and tension. In short, there was behind his proposal an idealistic cosmopolitanism that years earlier could also be located in Latin America in writings such as Ariel from José Enrique Rodó (1900), among others. Much has changed in the debate on transnationalism since then. Asleep for decades, it was reborn with the boom of globalization discussion in the late 1980s and 1990s. In fact, the debate on transnationalism strengthened against the most reductionist conceptions of globalization. Four main controversies and trends can be pointed out here. First, against those definitions that understand globalization as a process by which the people of the world are incorporated into a “single word society” (Albrow and King, 1990: 8) or as any process or relationship that somehow crosses state boundaries, transnational studies emphasize, in a more sophisticated way, the imbrication between diverse scales and places. As a result, instead of conceiving space in a unified and bounded style, it seeks to capture the diversity of social spaces forged on interregional and trans-local scales and scopes, as well as the flows within them and the mechanisms of connection. Second, transnational studies challenge the perspectives that understand globalization as an inevitable phenomenon which characterizes the ­development of our era. Instead of reducing the horizons of possibility, transnationalism connects people, devices and, with them, several possible paths. In this line, contingency gains centrality to the detriment of any ­deterministic and teleological position. Third, against the novelty of globalization, transnational studies emphasize the historicity of practices and processes as a longue durée phenomenon,

14  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel considering the articulation of different temporalities and spatialities. If the world-systems theory served as an important initial reference in that direction, the “transnational history” (Iriye, 2013; Saunier, 2013) approach can be brought as a relevant example today due to its proposal of decentring traditional analytical units and entities in order to grasp different types of exchanges and trends in a more flexible way. Finally, beyond partial and reductionist perspectives on globalization, transnational perspectives allow us to combine both the articulations “from above”, which marks the geopolitics of the power, and the practices constructed “from below”, typical of the geopolitics of resistance (Bringel, 2019). This can also be framed as “transnationalism from below” (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998). Indeed, the debate on transnationalism includes actors and issues as diverse as communities (Portes, 1996), capitals, flows (­Appadurai, 1990), trade, business, migration (Portes, Guarnizo and Landlot, 1999), identities (Westwood and Phizacklea, 2000), development (­Andolina, ­Laurie and Radcliffe, 2009) or collective action (Keck and Sikkink, 1998) and social movements (Tarrow, 2005). In an impressive effort of synthesis on the emerging perspectives on transnationalism, Khagram and Levitt (2008: 3) identify at least five intellectual foundations.: empirical transnationalism, focuses on describing, mapping, classifying and quantifying novel and/or potentially important transnational phenomena and dynamics; methodological transnationalism involves, at a minimum, reclassifying existing data, evidence, and historical and ethnographic accounts that are based on bounded or bordered units so that transnational forms and processes are revealed; theoretical transnationalism formulates explanations and crafts interpretations that either parallel, complement, supplement or are integrated into existing theoretical frameworks and accounts; philosophical transnationalism starts from the metaphysical assumption that social worlds and lives are inherently transnational; and, finally, public transnationalism creates space to imagine and legitimate options for social change and transformation that are normally obscured, by purposefully abandoning the expectation that most social processes are bounded and bordered. All of them are important and complementary in order to map the geopolitics of transnationalism.

Interregionalism and transnationalism intertwined: Euro-Latin American connections Not all transnational actors, dynamics, practices and connections are global. They can be restricted to different localities without reaching a truly planetary scope. Sometimes, they can involve a region as a whole, even contributing to reinforce a regional identity and a sense of belonging. In this book, we are particularly interested in the entanglements between Europe and Latin America and in how they allow us to consider interregionalism and transnationalism intertwined.

Interregionalism and transnationalism  15 Nevertheless, both regions cannot be taken for granted. They have been changing over time, internally and in their mutual relationships. They are neither fixed nor eternal. Therefore, they disputed and continue disputing with other constructions and regional imaginaries that challenge them. For example, there are many cultural, conceptual and political constructions that dispute and, in some cases, even deny the idea of Latin America as a region (Mignolo, 2005). Let us think, historically, in the notions of the United States of South America, Indoamerica or Abya Yala. The latter, which in Kuna people’s language means “land in its full maturity”, has been used for centuries – along with other regional constructions such as Tawantinsuyu and Anauhuac – as a self-designation of the original peoples of the continent as a counterpoint to America. In the change of century, with the strengthening of the indigenous movements, it is reappropriated and expanded. On the other hand, when we usually speak about Europe, there is always a primacy of Western Europe, often neglecting its internal diversity and, also in this case, other possibilities of regional constructions. From an interregional perspective, Euro-Latin America is the first experiment of this kind in the world. It is not a product of states and intellectuals of statecraft but it is also a product of social movements and activists. As it is shown by the dispute around the construction of Ibero-America as a geocultural region, it can be built and imagined from above – in the form of the Ibero-American Community of Nations (Comunidad Iberoamericana de Naciones) – but also from below, in an attempt to understand the alternative regional articulation (see chapters by Cairo, and Bringel and Cairo). In the first case, the Ibero-American Community of Nations dates from the 1980s, which means that it is a relatively recent creation. Nevertheless, it did not arise from nothing. Two of the usual elements in processes of identity building – a common past and language – lay at the foundation of its construction by the élites who had proposed it within the framework of celebration of the Fifth Centenary of the “discovery” of America. The main objective was to strengthen the role of Spain in the international system and at the same time disseminate and promote its image as a modern state. The project of the Ibero-American Community of Nations responds to the interests of Iberian and Latin American states in achieving certain autonomy in the international system in the face of the stronger powers of the EU and the United States. In no case, does it form part of a project of ­counter-hegemonic globalization. This is, however, true for the spaces of resistance to neoliberal globalization that use Ibero-American as a reference to alternative practices. We can briefly introduce an example: the creation and operation of certain ­Internationalist Solidarity Committees in Spain and Portugal with Latin American social movements and struggles. The alternative construction of an interregional counter-hegemonic perspective is linked to transnational actors, practices and dynamics. During their processes of internationalization, Latin American social movements

16  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel such as the Mexican Zapatistas or the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) receive demonstrations of solidarity from different sorts of organizations in Europe. We consider that in many ways these do not happen fortuitously or in the abstract, but are shaped around fields of geographical proximity and/ or cultural affinity. If we look to the Brazilian MST, the creation of supportive committees in Portugal and Spain, as well as in other parts of Europe, is fuelled by the diagnosis of the need to establish direct links of solidarity through movements in a highly institutionalized and professional context, where “political ­solidarity” is transformed into “solidarity politics” and where “companion” becomes “counterpart” (Bringel, 2014). The main work undertaken by solidarity groups is that of “translation” between different realities, politically challenging both sides of the Atlantic. Their actions help to project ­counter-hegemonic representations of Ibero-America from diverse transnational connections: educational practices, educational practices, political campaigns, internationalist brigades, spaces of articulation, mobilization and advocacy.

The content of the book Following this Introduction, the book is structured in three parts. In the first one, “Latin America and Europe in the contemporary world system: imperiality, domination and cooperation”, the three ways of relation between the regions of the centre and the periphery of the world system are explored. Although formal imperialism is already a past fact – even if there are a few remains, like Manuela Boatcā reminds us in her chapter – the “imperial nexus” is still alive in the minds and souls of Euro-American masters of government in relation to Latin America and other parts of the world. However, a subtler social-liberal domination is the most common feature of the relations between two regions that are characterized as different arenas in an interconnected world. And, finally, it is developing an interregional relation between Latin America and Europe that would allow the two regions to compete better in front of other interregional blocks, on the base of common democratic principles. The three ways of connection are today active, and help to conform, in different degrees along time, the relations between the two regions. David Slater in his chapter examines certain elements relating to the general phenomenon of what he calls Western geopolitical interventionism, although focused in the analysis of the “relationality between the United States as the world’s key imperial power, and the societies of the global south, especially the Latin South, or what is traditionally called Latin America”. It is argued that we cannot fully understand the dynamics of interventionism in isolation from the geopolitics of imperial power, which is propelled forward by a deeply rooted invasiveness. After distinguishing imperialism from imperiality, it is suggested that if we are going to develop an

Interregionalism and transnationalism  17 effective understanding of the imperial, it will be beneficial to our analysis if we (a) make a connection with both raciality and sexuality; (b) e­ xamine the linkage between the imperial at home and the imperial abroad and (c)  ­consider, no matter, how briefly, the relevance of centre-periphery relations; he calls these connections the “imperial nexus”. He concludes by stressing the point that the geopolitics of the imperial is most appropriately looked at as a potentially creative analytical node that can generate many new insights across a fertile and diversified terrain. The chapter by José Maurício Domingues deals with the global expansion of a late version of neoliberalism, which it names social liberalism. It keeps the pillars of neoliberalism, its individualism and utilitarianism, but introduces a concern with poverty. This is faced selectively, that is, through targeted policies concerned exclusively with the poor, whereby the social fabric is cut out according to different sections of the population. Latin America but also the world in general are discussed, with theoretical underpins and a contrast with the true expansion of social rights and citizenship. ­Neoliberalism was paramount in the transition to the present phase of modernity. But since the 1990s, a sort of social liberalism has been also crucial to the organization of current forms of global domination, including the forms of governmentality that shape contemporary subjectivities. In its turn, the chapter of Heriberto Cairo tries to understand the role of these two regions in the post-Cold War geopolitical order, keeping in mind two premises: both regions are not homogeneous at all (particularly from a structural point of view), and the relations between them have changed in the last quarter of century. The irruption of interregionalism in the 1990s has defined a new kind of cooperative relations between Europe and Latina America and the Caribbean regions, based in what has been called the “strategic partnership”. Although it has been developed another partial interregion, the Ibero-American Community, promoted by the governments of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin American republics, plus Portugal and Spain – especially the latter –, years before. In short, this piece tries to make an interregional perspective on geopolitical order. The second part of the book, “Geopolitical imaginaries and socio-­ territorial orders in Latin America and Europe”, deals with crossed perspectives of key geopolitical issues in (and between) the two regions. It includes new perspectives on regional and geopolitical imaginations of borders and boundaries in these regions, their geo-historical relations and transcontinental and transborder entanglements. In parallel, it also examines the impacts of global financial crisis in the generation of socio-territorial orders. Pedro dos Santos de Borba deals with the most durable, profound and consequential interregional process in history: modern colonialism. His chapter shows how until recently the interconnected character of modern colonialism was generally missing in the analysis of state formation, as if Western Europe and Latin America were examples of two contrasting but independent trajectories. He tries to invert the reasoning: instead of

18  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel pointing out the existing gaps between Latin American postcolonial states and the theoretical expectations generated by its European counterparts, he investigates what challenges and reconstructions are needed in our theoretical expectations in order to frame state formation as a systemic process, encompassing both European and Latin American experiences. For her part, Manuela Boatcā, advances an encompassing notion of ­Europe as a creolized space: it takes into account the regional entanglements to which European colonialism and imperialism have given rise since the sixteenth century and rethinks current Europe from its unacknowledged borders in the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea. In order to show how “creolization” as a term originally coined to describe processes specific to the Caribbean speaks to a different understanding of Europe up to this day, the history and the concept of Caribbean Europe are used to shed light on a previously developed notion of multiple and unequal Europes. The paper ultimately argues that a rethinking of Europe from its Atlantic and Caribbean borders successfully challenges Occidentalist notions of Europeanness and the modern nation-state, as well as related notions of internal and external borders, sovereignty and modernity. In the next chapter, Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda show how private credit-rating agencies downgraded some European economies in the light of the outbreak of the 2008 crisis, as they had been doing in Latin America since the 1980s. Improvement programmes (e.g. Country Brand) have been developed in order to reverse this downgrading and to promote business internationalization and attract private investment, especially from emerging countries. The aim of their article is to situate this process within the theoretical debate on the role of the state, and to reflect upon the features defining a competitive and “accommodating” state in the context of crisis. Furthermore, the authors analyse the Spanish case to show the strategic selection of discourses, instruments and regulations aiming at supporting and accommodating the geo-economic expansion of “national” companies and attracting multilatina companies in the context of the financial crisis and the rating of countries in terms of “country risk”. The next two chapters discuss the border issue directly. Olivier Thomas Kramsch describes the impasse resulting from a now hegemonic conceptual framework which foregrounds the ostensibly socially constructed nature of borders over any putative “natural” spatial context. As a result, people are left abandoned in a world of ceaselessly reproduced Us/Them relations, a complacent “good fences make good neighbours” philosophy whose political manifestation it is now seen all around in la misère of newly constructed fences lining the interstices of the EU – from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea – and in the American context the ongoing catastrophe that is “Trump’s Wall”. How to move beyond the impasse? Drawing on the geo-literary reflections of Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada, the author seeks to move beyond the violence of a diffusionist model of border-making in the Americas driven by Europe-centred power/knowledge/desire, proposing in its place a

Interregionalism and transnationalism  19 utopian horizon marking the multidirectional and comparative-relational nature of border production in both Europe and the Americas. Focusing on the case of a nominally “local” boundary dispute between Spain and Gibraltar rife with trans-Atlantic reverberations, the chapter demonstrates how European and Latin American borders are entangled in a socio-­spatial horizon whose politics offer a potential pathway out of the labyrinth of European solitude now facing contemporary border studies in the English language. In the last contribution of the second part of the book, María Lois points out how questions such as biometric borders, smart borders or mobile borders raise conceptual problems for research agendas in political geography, challenging the so-called conventional wisdom by underlining the contingency of borders. In this regard, discussions in the field of Border ­Studies are moving towards an understanding of borders and boundaries as a set of mutually constitutive practices, where contradictory interpretations are discussed, and a growing number of actors are embraced. But this reframing of borders may also underline other conceptual challenges, such as the modern geopolitical imagination of regions and their presence when making sense of borders geopolitical reconfigurations. Her chapter presents an assemblage of thoughts around borders and boundaries in Europe and Latin America. By using different texts, some conversations will be started on how borders research may go beyond regional gazes to gather an interregional theoretical horizon. Finally, the third and last part of the book is focused on a reading of (inter) regionalism from below. Social movements, feminist networks and alternative pedagogies are analysed in their potential to connect concrete social actors, realities and regions. An important dimension of the chapters included in this part of the book refers to the transnational circulation of ideas, social practices and resistances. The different “waves” or “cycles” of internationalist solidarity are analysed, focusing in the current era and giving examples of how it is possible to constitute interregional c­ ounter-spaces of representation. Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo point out that the Global South has not been constituted as such; there are only processes of articulation. They attempt to explore the lines of regional articulation of the Global South in the globalization processes. They consider that in many ways these do not happen fortuitously, but are shaped around fields of geographical proximity and/or cultural affinity. Along these same lines, they examine how Ibero-American geopolitical representation, on the basis of cultural affinity, could become a space of counter-representation thanks to the work of “translation” of social activists. The chapter by Almudena Cabezas-González and Gabriela Brochner presents a feminist geopolitical practice that seeks to expand regionalism approach addressing feminist transnational action in Latin America and Europe and between both regions. After a brief discussion on literature, they

20  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel analyse the new cycle of feminist mobilizations that combine classical transnational campaigns and coalitions, and communicative actions to establish effective modes of feminist protest. Our goal is to address interregionalism by drawing on the experience of some Latin American and European feminist actions from 2014 to the global strike in 2018. Their discussion focuses on two mobilizations: the #NiUnaMenos from Argentina to Spain and the Women’s Strike from Poland to Argentina and Spain and two interregional networks: the Federica Montseny and RedLatinas. Reflections are based on previous intensive fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2014 in different Latin American and European countries and participatory research during the 2014–2018 new cycle of feminist large protest (Argentina, Brazil, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Uruguay). Following the same line of discussion, Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel analyse in “New configurations in the Geopolitics of transnational solidarities” the transition from “Zapatista solidarity” to contemporary “outraged solidarity” taking into consideration the case of solidarity with Mexico from Barcelona. Both moments are compared taking into account the social basis of solidarity; the composition and structure of solidarity networks; the repertoires of action; the communicative forms and strategies, both in the use of digital technologies and face-to-face; and, finally, the different forms of construction of the scales. After this, generational changes are pointed out and the grammars of activism are discussed in order to understand the new configurations of the geographies of solidarities connecting places and regions. Last but not least, in the epilogue, Teivo Teivainen explores how the ­European crisis has created opportunities for a more democratic relationship with the Global South. His focus is on the pedagogical dimension of ­European-Latin American relations. He analyses three dimensions of changes in Europe: precarization of labour, transnational debt discipline and cultural hybridization. These elements are explored as examples of what the author calls “Latin Americanization” of Europe. Inspired by Aníbal ­Quijano, he assumes that the traditional conceptualization of non-Europeans as belonging to the past expresses a coloniality of power. His main argument is that the Latin Americanization of Europe opens a window of opportunity for social movements to break with one aspect of coloniality of power.

References Agnew, John, and Corbridge, Stuart (1995) Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Albrow, Marti, and King, Elizabeth (eds.) (1990) Globalization, Knowledge and Society. London: Sage. Andolina, Robert; Laurie, Nina, and Radcliffe, Sarah (2009) Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power and Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke ­University Press. Appadurai, Arjun (1990) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture ­Economy.” Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, 1–23.

Interregionalism and transnationalism  21 Bourne, Randolph (1916) “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly, no. 118, July, 86–97. Brenner, Neil (1999) “Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies.” Theory and Society, vol. 28, no. 1, 39–78. Bringel, Breno (2014) “MST’s Agenda of Emancipation: Interfaces of National Politics and Global Contestation.” In J. N. Pieterse and A. Cardoso (eds.) Brazil ­Emerging: Inequality and Emancipation. London and New York: Routledge, 89–126. Bringel, Breno (2015) “Social Movements and Contemporary Modernity: Internationalism and Patterns of Global Contestation.” In B. Bringel and J. M. Domingues (eds.) Global Modernity and Social Contestation. London: Sage, 122–138. Bringel, Breno (2019) “Latin American Perspectives on Social Movements Research”. In F. Beigel (ed.) Key-Texts for Latin American Sociology. London: Sage, 339–359. Cairo, Heriberto (2003) “Panregiones: viejas y nuevas ideas geopolíticas.” In A. ­Rocha Valencia et al. (eds.) La integración regional de América Latina en una encrucijada histórica. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 31–48. Cairo, Heriberto (2008a) “Orden geopolítico – Orden internacional.” In J. C. Pereira (ed.) Diccionario de relaciones internacionales y política exterior. Barcelona: Ariel, 689–691. Cairo, Heriberto (2008b) “A América Latina nos modelos geopolíticos modernos: da marginalização à preocupação com sua autonomia.” Caderno CRH (Salvador da Bahia, Brasil), vol. 21, no. 53, 221–237. Gardini, Gian Luca (2018) “Introduction: Interregionalism and the Americas.” In G. L. Gardini, S. Koschut and A. Falke (eds.) Interregionalism and the Americas. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, xi–xxiii. Gardini, Gian Luca, and Malamud, Andrés (2018) “Interregionalism and the ­A mericas: A Conceptual Framework.” In G. L. Gardini, S. Koschut and A. Falke (eds.) Interregionalism and the Americas. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1–18. Giblin-Delvallet, Béatrice (1993) “Région.” In Y. Lacoste (dir.) Dictionaire de Géopolitique. Paris: Flammarion, 1264–1267. Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo, and Smith, Michael Peter (1998) “The Locations of Transnationalism.” In L. E. Guarnizo and M. P. Smith (eds.) Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 3–34. Hänggi, Heiner (2006) “Interregionalism as a Multifaceted Phenomenon: In Search of a Typology.” In J. Rüland, H. Hänggi and R. Roloff (eds.) Interregionalism and International Relations: A Stepping Stone to Global Governance? London and New York: Routledge, 31–62. Hannerz, Ulf (1996) Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Hettne, Björn, and Söderbaum, Fredrik (2005) “Civilian Power or Soft Imperialism? The EU as a Global Actor and the Role of Interregionalism.” European Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 10, no. 4, 535–552. Iriye, Akira (2013) Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future. New York: Palgrave. Keck, Margaret, and Sikkink, Kathryn (1998) Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Khagram, Sanjeev, and Levitt, Peggy (2008) “Constructing Transnational Studies.” In S. Khagram and P. Levitt (eds.) The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. London and New York: Routledge, 1–18.

22  Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel Leitner, Helga; Sheppard, Eric, and Sziarto, Kristin M. (2008) “The Spatialities of Contentious Politics”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 33, no. 2, 157–172. Link, Werner (2006) “The New Transatlantic Interregionalism: Balanced or ­Hegemonic?” In J. Rüland, H. Hänggi and R. Roloff (eds.) Interregionalism and International Relations: A Stepping Stone to Global Governance? London and New York: Routledge, 149–154. Massey, Doreen (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of M ­ innesota Press. Mignolo, Walter (2005) The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Molano-Cruz, Giovanni (2017) “La construcción de un mundo de regiones.” Revista de Estudios Sociales, no. 61, 14–27. Niemann, Michael (1998) “Regionalization and Globalization from a Spatial ­Perspective.” Space and Polity, vol. 2, no. 2, 109–126. Niemann, Michael (2000) A Spatial Approach to Regionalisms in the Global Economy. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Portes, Alejandro (1996) “Transnational Communities: Their Emergence and Significance in the Contemporary World-System.” In R. P. Korzeniewicz and W. Smith (eds.) Latin America in the World Economy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 151–168. Portes, Alejandro, Guarnizo, Luis and Landolt, Patricia (1999) “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 217–237. Rosa, Harmut (2015) Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Rüland, Jürgen; Hänggi, Heiner, and Roloff, Ralf (eds.) (2006) Interregionalism and International Relations: A Stepping Stone to Global Governance? London and New York: Routledge. Sánchez Bajo, Claudia (1999) “The European Union and Mercosur: A Case of ­Inter-Regionalism”. Third World Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 5, 927–941. Saunier, Pierre-Yves (2013) The Palgrave MacMillan Transnational History. New York: Palgrave. Tarrow, Sidney (2005) The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Peter J., and Flint, Colin (2000) Political Geography: World-Economy, ­Nation-State and Locality. 3rd ed. London: Longman. Telò, Mario; Fawcett, Louis, and Ponjaert, Frederik (2015) Interregionalism and the European Union. A Post-Revisionist Approach to Europe’s Place in a Changing World. London: Ashgate. Westwood, Sallie, and Phizacklea, Annie (2000) Trans-Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging. London: Routledge.

Part I

Latin America and Europe in the contemporary world-system Imperiality, domination and cooperation

1 Interventionism, invasiveness and the geopolitics of the imperial In search of the pathways of power David Slater Introductory remarks Against a backdrop of recent Western interventions in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Mali, the general question of geopolitical ­sovereignty and the re-assertion of what has been called “liberal imperialism” have clearly returned to the agenda of global politics.1 In this paper, I want to consider certain elements pertaining to the general phenomenon of what I shall call Western geopolitical interventionism, with an emphasis being given to its unilateral as opposed to multilateral form. This kind of intervention will be considered in its relation to the way we think about democracy and the politics of self-determination. It is then argued that we cannot fully understand the dynamics of interventionism, in isolation from the geopolitics of imperial power which is propelled by a deeply rooted ­phenomenon of invasiveness. Potentially, what we have here is a series of links between expansionism, intervention and invasiveness. Expansionism is a characteristic feature of all imperial politics but I would argue that although it is a necessary feature of imperial power, it is not a sufficient feature. What is crucial to understand are the driving forces behind the will to expand, and the associated perceptions of the societies into which the imperial power is to expand. In some ways, the term “intervention” does not fully capture the reality of penetration, since there is an underlying sense of coming between, which has a rather neutral sound to it. In the interventions that are mentioned in this article, the United States is not passively present; it is active, disruptive and invasive. In the history of Western imperialism, the invasive power does not act as a peaceful “coming betweener” – rather it deploys all forms of power to achieve its objectives. This is why invasive interventions are a key part of the way we conceptualize imperial power – they encourage us to think more effectively about the imperial in contemporary world politics. With these ideas in mind, the first two sections of the paper deal with the invasiveness of geopolitical interventions and the fragility of popular sovereignty in the shadow of US power. It is suggested that there are five concepts that are useful in considering the meaning of geopolitical interventions: (a) desire, (b) political will; (c) capacities; (d) justification and (e) resistance.

26  David Slater Within these early sections of the paper, there is also an attempt made to characterize the specificity of the United States as a post-colonial imperial power. Moving on to the next section, I give some attention to what I refer to as the imperial nexus. Having distinguished imperialism from imperiality, the latter term being defined as the right, privilege and sentiment of being imperial, or of defending ideas of empire. I suggest that it would be beneficial to the analysis if we (a) make a connection with both raciality and sexuality, (b)  examine the linkage between the imperial at home and the imperial abroad and (c) examine, no matter how briefly, the relevance of centre-­periphery relations; I call these connections the imperial nexus. My analytical attention falls on to the relationality between the United States as the world’s key imperial power, and the societies of the global south, especially the Latin South, or what is traditionally called Latin America. In this analysis which concentrates on US-Latin American relations, I do not want to imply that these relations can always be extrapolated to a First World/Third World level. They are illustrative and symptomatic of those First World/Third World relations but they do not exhaust the terrain of those relations. I conclude by stressing the point that the geopolitics of the imperial is most appropriately looked at as a potentially creative analytical node that can generate many new insights. Equally, this nodal point can help us begin to rethink the accumulated knowledge concerning imperialism in a global setting (see, e.g., Mignolo, 2005). In this context, I would suggest that it is important to move away from a narrowly economistic approach to the issues at hand, and develop a more multidimensional perspective which keeps open space for new ideas and fresh lines of enquiry.

Situating geopolitical interventions The geopolitics of Western interventionism can be highlighted as exemplifying the longevity of an invasive logic. This invasive or imperial logic can be seen as incorporating an official discourse of democracy and progress, whereby Occidental interventions are frequently portrayed as being part of a long-term project to democratize the planet, albeit within the overall diffusion of the founding tenets of Western civilization. However, contrary to this uncritically top-down perspective, it can be argued that the West, and specifically the United States, has been responsible for both the termination of democratic governments in the global south and the buttressing of pro-Western military regimes, which, especially in the era of the Cold War, established various forms of tyranny. With respect to Anglo-American terminations of democratic governments, one can mention Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Uruguay in 1973, Grenada in 1983 and Nicaragua during the 1980s, although the last-named case did not include a military takeover.2 As far as support for military regimes is concerned, we can mention

The geopolitics of the imperial  27 Argentina in 1976, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and Uruguay in 1973, and the list becomes considerably longer if we also include African and Asian examples. Moreover, it needs to be recalled that the West continues to support non-democratic regimes as is transparent in the Middle East (such as with Bahrain, for a long period Egypt and Saudi Arabia and all with an appalling human rights record). What we need to emphasize here is that those metropolitan societies in particular the United States and the United Kingdom, which have projected a Panglossian perspective on their place in the world, have histories of imperial penetration of societies of the global south, and these penetrations reflect an asymmetrical relation between imperializing and imperialized societies which ought not to be forgotten. The way these events are remembered will vary markedly between north and south, and they will also constitute a significant part of the different nature of the political unconscious of ­Euro-American societies on the one hand and non-Western peripheral societies on the other. We can note here that events such as the overthrow of a democratic government may well be riveted in the memory of a third world people, whereas in the metropolitan country, there may be little if any recollection of, for example, a military coup d’état which took place in a faraway country. It is in this context that Jameson (1992) made a distinction between first and third worlds whereby, whilst the first world has both the power and the propensity to forget the geopolitical history of third world regions (­although this is changing with security issues), the third world has much less parallel space of manoeuvre and has far more dependency on the first world. When we look at lists of injustices in the world, it is not unusual to find that the sorts of geopolitical interventions highlighted above are rarely if at all mentioned; they tend to remain invisible. For example, in a short article on the nature and range of international justice, Sen (2009: 26), writing for a wide audience, lists the following types of injustice: slavery, the subjugation of women, the extreme exploitation of vulnerable labour, the gross medical neglect of the bulk of today’s world population, the continued practice of torture and the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger. Of course, these are all relevant sources of injustice, and neither are they new.3 Although the above are all highly relevant sources of injustice, surely the repeated violation of popular sovereignty in the global south needs to be on the list. In fact, I would argue that such violations of international law and abnegations of the rights of peoples constitute a cardinal or foundational form of international injustice. The gravity of interventionism is sometimes legitimized through the Western assertion that it is diffusing democracy to a country that needs it, for example Iraq or Afghanistan. But how can the imposition of one form of democracy on to another society be justified? As Judith Butler (2010: 36–37) concisely puts it “what does democracy mean if it is not based on popular decision and majority rule … can one power ‘bring’ or ‘install’ democracy on a people over whom it has no jurisdiction?”

28  David Slater Furthermore, as Butler points out, those who kill in the name of democracy or security, or those who make incursions into the sovereign lands of others in the name of diffusing freedom or human rights often do so as if they are executing a kind of “global responsibility”. How justifiable is such an assumed responsibility? It is surely quite unjustifiable since it is embedded in imperial reason or what Gill (2012) has recently called “imperial common sense”. What is required is a rethinking and reimagining of the meanings of global responsibility so that to start with the geopolitics of imposition and the imperial appropriation of the concept of responsibility can be countered and transcended. When we look at the geopolitics of interventionism on a broad canvass, it becomes clear that the justification or legitimization of Western invasiveness (e.g. the spreading of the US model of market-based democracy) is intimately linked into the desire to intervene which is more multifaceted than the traditional idea that interventionism must be explained in relation to the search for raw materials, resources and cheap labour; these are important factors which should not be ignored, but the desire to intervene brings together the pressures of the geopolitical, the cultural, the military the psychological and the economic. Above all, I would argue that this multidimensional nature of desire requires, within the emerging imperial society, a continual articulation and justification of expansion and intervention, or as Kiernan (1974: 100) the Marxist historian, put it some time ago, “… empires must first have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into …” In other words, rather than solely repeat well-established socio-economic arguments about the expansionist drive of imperialism, we might benefit from an analysis of the formation of an imperial reason or common sense within certain societies, certainly visible in the nineteenth century of the United States. Hence, a concern with desire can lead us into an initial discussion of i­ mperiality – a perspective that rests on a sense of Occidental privilege and s­ upremacy, which is deeply sedimented in Western society (I shall return to this point later). Although desire is crucial, it is not sufficient. For desire to be effective, it has to be channelled, and here political will is necessary. It is within the political space of the state that the various societal compulsions and perspectives are mediated and crystallized into a specific strategy. In the example of foreign policy, the production of a number of doctrines, for instance, the Truman Doctrine, or the Reagan Doctrine, were the work of policy intellectuals concentrated in the arena of governmental power. Any theory of imperialism must, one can argue, include an appreciation of the role of state intellectuals in formulating a global strategy, and the Project for a New American Century exemplifies this particular point. Moreover, it is equally necessary to underscore the importance of ­capacity. That is to say, if we suggest that an imperial political will is developed in the arena of state or governmental power, such a political will not be

The geopolitics of the imperial  29 effective if there has been no development of the military capacity to carry out or implement the key points of that given political will. For example, the British took over the Malvinas in 1833, ten years after the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine, but the United States did not have the naval capacity to confront the British; however, by the end of the nineteenth century it was a different matter since the United States had by that time a powerful navy, and in a frontier dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana, the United States was able to take the upper hand, favouring Venezuela’s position. Moreover, Secretary of State Richard Olney asserted quite categorically that the United States was practically sovereign “on this continent” (see Olney, 1895: 64–67, quoted in Holden and Zolov, 2000). Desire, political will and capacities require a justification. This has been provided by the notion that the West is diffusing and exporting a variety of beneficial modes of societal organization, through, for example, spreading “civilization”, “democracy”, “modernization” and “freedom”. These four elements or concepts (namely, desire, political will, capacity and justification or legitimization) provide us with a possible frame for understanding geopolitical interventionism but we need to add a fifth element, which is the role played by resistance. Here, we have a number of examples from different parts of the world, and the essential point remains linked to the intervenor’s perception of the society to be invaded, which naturally will be strongly affected by the history of the relations between the two countries. Broadly speaking, in the case of Latin America, the development of nationalism from the early part of the twentieth century was to be seen as a response to “gun-boat diplomacy” and the kind of imperial politics that was expressed in the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904. Growing nationalism was also a response to the need for an indigenous identity, which expanded across the Latin South during what came to be called “The American Century”. Subsequently, Washington modified its approach to interventions, and introduced in the early 1930s what ­Franklin D Roosevelt called the “good neighbour” policy so that matters of aid and trade could be given more priority within the overall context of Inter-­ American relations. Thus, as an example, when political turbulence broke the surface in the Cuba of the 1930s, the US Administration preferred to underline the relevance of dialogue and the search for consensus, rather than reaching for the nearest weapon of war.4 It can be argued, as my examples demonstrate, that a Western invasive logic has been a constant feature of international relations, within which the asymmetries of geopolitical power are rooted in the history of the colonial/imperial encounter. In addition, it is useful to remind ourselves that in the West the reality of this invasive logic has often been little more than a shadowy presence in the studies of globalization, modernity and democracy. Also, when examining this theme, it is worthwhile indicating that US interventionism has a longer history than is often assumed. It is not just a phenomenon that was coterminous with the onset of the Cold War, and the

30  David Slater rivalry between the two superpowers. So, for example, in the early history of the United States, geopolitical incursions can take us back to well before the Bolshevik revolution; for instance, in the period from 1798 to 1895, the United States made 103 interventions in a variety of countries – e­ xamples ranging from Nicaragua to China, from Argentina to Japan and from ­Hawaii to Portuguese West Africa (see Zinn 1996: 290–291). These were embryonic military interventions coming before the perceived danger of the 1917 Revolution and the birth of a communist state. Behind these incursions and penetrations, which were intensified during the twentieth century, one encounters a picture of the United States as a “global sovereign” arrogating to itself the power, whenever deemed necessary, to act above the law. Its continual blockade of Cuba, since the early part of the 1960s; its rejection of the World Court jurisdiction over its attack in the mid-1980s on Nicaragua; its more recent illegal invasion of Iraq, President Obama’s extended and illegal use of drones for “targeted ­assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the continuing use of torture at, for example, Guantanamo Bay – all these instances give credence to the idea that in the last analysis it is the United States that is the genuine ‘rogue state’”.5 What then are the consequences of the continuing deployment of this kind of power – imperial power – on the societies of the global south, and on the way we conceptualize their politics. At this moment of time, it would surely be unwise to ignore the impact of the world’s remaining superpower, a state that has been described as the world’s “paramount power” (Brzezinski, 2004: xii).

Sovereignty in the shadow of imperial power When we turn our attention to the level of the nation-state, a kind of geopolitical pivot, it is important to consider the concept of popular self-­ determination. One definition which takes us down a fertile pathway states that “no ruler of a state has the right to interfere in the government of ­another … and the government of the ruler of one state is not subject to the decision of the ruler of any other state”; furthermore, it is suggested that “the strongest moral argument for self-determination is that political independence is necessary for the elimination of social injustice and for the development of just institutions” (Beitz, 1979: 75). Clearly then the deployment of imperial power would violate such a set of relations since the imperial nexus entails the subordination of other states in both direct and indirect ways, or similarly expressed it can be suggested that imperial dominance involves the subordination of the sovereignty of another state through the exercise of a hierarchic power in varied forms, including the military, political, economic and cultural. As an example, the United States has acted as a classic imperial power in the post-colonial periphery, and even though it did not annex territory (with the exception of the Philippines), force was consistently used to curb revolutionary social transformations whether

The geopolitics of the imperial  31 they be nationalist or socialist/communist, and to contain challenges that would have led to greater post-colonial autonomy (examples such as Cuba, ­Nicaragua, V ­ ietnam and Indonesia spring to mind).6 Furthermore, as Golub (2010: 14–15) reminds us, the vast informal sphere of American Empire has always rested on a planetary security established during the Second World War whose forward points, the archipelago of land-based and floating military platforms disseminated throughout the world, constitute the mobile frontiers of US sovereignty and should be understood as the territorialized nodes of empire (emphasis added). This situation has not changed during the Obama Presidency, which in Latin America signalled its intentions by countenancing the 2009 military coup in Honduras, and mandating the expansion of US military bases in Colombia, with the clear objective of putting pressure on the neighbouring countries of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. Self-determination, self-government and popular sovereignty all express a deeply anchored sense of independence and autonomy, and as such come into conflict with the ubiquitous presence of US imperial power. And yet there is another factor which blurs to some extent the dichotomy between the imperiality of power and expressions of post-colonial autonomy. Thus, when the specificities of the United States in the world are examined, the straightforward idea that the United States is unremittingly against self-determination, and fully opposed to the realities of independence for the nations of the world, is too rigid a proposition (see, e.g., S ­ impson, 2012). Expressed differently, whilst the United States has developed as an imperial power that has confronted the articulation of other independent positions (e.g. in relation to the diffusion of the “pink tide” in Latin ­A merica); nevertheless, the United States, as an intrinsic part of its original post-coloniality, has continued to claim self-­determination as a specifically American idea. This contradictory juxtaposition, or clash of conflicting identities, emerged as a result of the defeat of British colonialism on the North American continent which, in turn, was followed during the nineteenth century by US expansion and the establishment of the ­i nitial bases of an imperial power. What this means is that the United States is the only Western nation that can be characterized as a post-colonial imperial power. By declaring its independence from Britain, the United States became a post-colonial society, and this has given it a lineage which has influenced the formulation of its foreign policy and the overall representation of itself in and to the world. Hence, when the United States has intervened in another country, or threatened to intervene, a discursive separation has been made between the governors and the governed or between the government and the people. In other words, the United States has, on occasions, assumed the mantle of

32  David Slater protecting the people of another country from their own government, as in the Cuban case with the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 or with the invasion of Grenada in 1983. What I am suggesting here is that the United States, implicitly acting as the “global sovereign”, has a history of providing tutelage for peripheral and more vulnerable societies. More recently, in a widely circulated speech given in 2011, President Obama reminded Americans that: We must remember that what sets America apart is not solely our power, it is the principles upon which our Union was founded … We stand not for empire, but for self-determination … that is why we have a stake in the democratic aspirations that are now washing across the Arab world (emphasis added). (quoted in Simpson, 2012: 693) In this passage, Obama connects with a long US tradition of representing itself as a guardian of democratic virtue and a steward of the self-­ determination of the world’s peoples. In this text, one has a connection with the discourse of exceptionalism and the claim that America’s special destiny permits it to pursue policies aimed at democratizing dictatorships because its own existence is worthy of special measures – a rationale not permitted to other nations. There is also here a presumption of innocence, or as ­Barber (2004: 81) puts it “the myth of innocence protects America … from the onerous burdens of historical responsibility for war or anarchy or injustice or conquest” In a similar vein, Atwood (2010: 231) writes that “war is the American way of life”, and “the American project began in violence …”. The myth of innocence is deeply rooted in US geopolitical history, going together with an oft negative representation of other societies; and it ought to be underscored that the myth of innocence and virtue continues into the contemporary period.7 One recent example of the projection of an innocent and benevolent image for the geopolitical history of the United States can be found in the National Security Strategy document for 2010. The following short paragraph captures the essence of a projection of benevolence and virtue: America’s example is also a critical component of our foundation. The human rights which America has stood for since our founding have enabled our leadership, provided a source of inspiration for peoples around the world, and drawn a clear contrast between the United States and our democratic allies, and those nations and individuals that deny or suppress human rights. Our efforts to live our own values and uphold the principles of democracy in our own society, underpin our support for the aspirations of the oppressed abroad, who know they can turn to America for leadership based on justice and hope. (The White House, 2010: 10)

The geopolitics of the imperial  33 Whilst this official perspective is broadly present in interpretations of US foreign policy, nonetheless there are certain breaks in the cloud wherein specific defence intellectuals or government leaders have expressed views that go against the current. One example is particularly apposite. In his 1995 book on the Vietnam War, entitled In Retrospect, the ex-Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara identified a number of reasons for the Vietnam disaster. The following points are summarily taken from McNamara’s instructive text, which in total lists eleven errors. Here, I highlight five of the McNamara points: (1) we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of Vietnamese actions and we misjudged their geopolitical intentions; (2) we viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in relation to our own experience; (3) we underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values, (4) our judgements of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the people in the territory where we were engaged (emphasis added) and (5) we did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient, and in addition we do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image (see McNamara, 1995: 321–323). These are points that are still fundamentally relevant; they go to the heart of the matter, revealing the depth of US misunderstanding, misjudgement and prejudice that plagued the prosecution of America’s war in Vietnam. In addition, many non-Western societies have suffered from a very specific Western brand of condescending ignorance and in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, similar prejudices were in evidence as Edward Said cogently pointed out in the 2003 preface to his Orientalism (Said, 2003).

Exploring the imperial nexus Taking the above theme on sovereignty and imperial power and connecting it to the broader world of geopolitics, it might be worthwhile referring to an important and well-known argument in Laclau and Mouffe’s 1985 text on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy where they make the following o ­ bservation – namely that a key difference may be posited between advanced industrial societies and the periphery of the capitalist world. In the former, “the proliferation of points of antagonism permits the multiplication of democratic struggles, but these struggles, given their diversity, do not tend to constitute a ‘people’, that is, to enter into equivalence with one another and to divide the political space into two antagonistic fields”. In contradistinction, in the countries of the Third World, imperialist exploitation and the predominance of brutal and centralized forms of domination tend from the beginning to endow the popular struggle with a centre, with a single and clearly defined enemy. Here the division of the political space into two fields is present from the outset, but the diversity of democratic struggles is more reduced. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985)

34  David Slater To take this differentiation further, we can recall several points Laclau (2001) makes in a related paper on democracy and power. Here, it is suggested that there is always an inherent ambiguity concerning the democratic process. Hence, on the one hand, democracy can be seen as the attempt to organize political space around the universality of the community with efforts to constitute a unity of one people. On the other hand, democracy has also been conceived of as an extension of a logic of equality to broader spheres of social relations – social and economic equality, racial equality, gender equality, etc., so that here democracy involves respect for differences. The ambiguity of democracy can thus be formulated as requiring unity but only being thinkable through diversity (Laclau, 2001: 4). But how do these varied points relate to the question of imperial democracy? In the context of global politics, the attempt to export and promote one vision of democracy (the neoliberal vision) as a unifying project across frontiers clashes with the logic of differences, but in a way that is rooted in nationalist discourses. In the formulations developed by Laclau (2001) and Mouffe (2000), as well as by other theoretically engaged writers who have worked on questions of democracy such as Lefort (1988) and Rancière (1995), there is an implicit assumption that one is dealing with a territorially intact polity, which might be a reasonable assumption for Britain, or France or the United States, but which becomes less realistic when one is focusing on a society of the global south. In other words, there is a guiding assumption that the conceptual terrain can be developed in accordance with a geopolitical context where the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state goes unchallenged. However, where one has the global presence of an imperial power (or powers), the autonomy of different democratic experiments may be subjected to external subversion – there may be, as has been the case ­h istorically, and mentioned in the early part of the paper, another destabilizing logic which might have the power to overrule the two indigenous logics concerning universality and difference, In this sense, the internal tension between the logic of unity and the logic of difference may be overshadowed or displaced by an imperial logic of incursion or invasion. This means that we have three logics, where the third is externally based. When imperial power is being challenged, there is normally at the same time a trend towards the amplification of popular – democratic demands. In the context of US-Latin American relations, the mission to universalize a US template of democracy is being contested by a wide gamut of political forces or parties and social movements (see, e.g. Guardiola-Rivera, 2010: 368–369; Milne, 2012: 197–219). The promotion of liberal democracy from above may be sustained by imperial sentiment and the weight of traditional procedures and structures inside the homeland, but it is actively called into question in a continent increasingly impatient with being framed as the passive recipient. In fact, it is in Latin America where one can find new approaches to politics and in a Gramscian perspective a new kind of optimism of the will, or what Guardiola-Rivera (2010) calls a new transformative politics.8

The geopolitics of the imperial  35 At the same time, it is important to avoid romanticism. The marea rosada (pink tide) is clearly not free from dissonances and divisions, and recent events such as the 2009 coup in Honduras, and the attempted coup in Ecuador indicate that the “tide” may be checked, at least temporarily. ­Nevertheless, it is worth noting that some twenty years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a majority of the population of Latin America lives under democratically elected governments that in some important measure identify themselves as being “socialist” albeit expressed in quite general terms. It is quite feasible to suggest that the tide has been a democratic one, whereas, as Beverley (2011: 11) rightly points out, the efforts to block it, like the failed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, or the conservative mobilization against Evo Morales in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz de la Sierra region or the militarization of the Colombian countryside, have expressed a resuscitated form of authoritarian politics. At the same time, Laclau (2005: 230–231) stresses the point that an irruption of new demands occurs in societies which are still very much capitalist societies. For Laclau, capitalism can be defined as a complex in which economic, political, military, technological and other determinations are endowed with their own logic, and each enters into the determination of the movement of the whole; this can be looked at as a new kind of globalized capitalism, wherein new antagonisms have emerged, and in which there is a greater proliferation of difference. At the same time, it is important to connect to an earlier critique of capital which stressed the point that capital is a larger, more creative and destructive form of power than anything else in human history and its fundamentally anti-democratic force continues to limit the spread of emancipations in all spheres of social life. Emancipation can have various expressions and one example is clearly that of the struggle against imperial power. When we pose questions about challenging the imperial mentality, it is important at the outset to remember that the imperial is not a phenomenon that only belongs to the world of international relations; on the contrary, the imperial present goes to the heart of Western society. Paul Gilroy (2005: 142), for example, reminds us that empires were not just distant terminal points for trading activity, but rather the imperial mentalities of empire were brought back home before the arrival of immigrants. And this transfer helped to generate an imperial subjectivity inside Western societies which was deepened through the development of colonial and imperial encounters. Further, as Kaplan (2002) reminds us in the case of the United States there were many examples of intimate connections between the formation of national identity and imperial expansion. In addition, Kaplan makes the useful point that whereas on the one hand anarchy is treated by imperial culture as a haunting spectre that must be controlled, on the other hand, discord and division can equally be induced by empire, leading in the post-intervention period to failure and new forms of turbulence, disorder and political conflict, as has been the case in both Afghanistan and Iraq.9

36  David Slater Intervention to erase the threat of instability and guarantee geopolitical security has formed a key element of US foreign policy from the early part of the twentieth century onward, as embodied, inter alia, in the Roosevelt Corollary, the Truman Doctrine, the Rio pact and the National Security Strategies of 2002, 2006 and 2010. Turning to the middle of the twentieth century, and the onset of Cold War geopolitics, it can be noted that the United States was characterized by the establishment of a national security state and an incipient militarization process that included a new policing of subjectivity. The Cold War was not only a phenomenon of world politics; it was joined to the “red scare” and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The activities of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy were at the core of the red scare, and ­McCarthyism was very much the Cold War at home, where people who were critical and questioning in their approach to politics were stigmatized as traitors, appeasers and deviants and subjected to unremitting discrimination. The Cold War was the embodiment of containment and intervention at home and abroad. Its portrayal of “us” and “them”, of “friends” and “enemies”, of threats within and without, wove together issues of security, geopolitics, subjectivity and power so that civilizing or modernizing the non-Western other could be defined as a matter of security and stability that transcended national boundaries. In a further more contemporary example, it can be clearly seen that in the period characterized by the so-called “war on terror”, dating from approximately 9/11, a more authoritarian perspective emerges with respect to both the international and domestic spheres. In an increasingly privatized and militarized democracy, Human Rights Watch has documented the continual circumvention of the law in the treatment of prisoners and detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. As Eisenstein (2007: 54) notes, humiliation and degradation, as well as coercive interrogation are now permissible and the Commander-in-Chief is not bound by international laws. Furthermore, offshore, undisclosed and off-limits sites have been created in which to detain terror suspects, a process termed “extraordinary rendition” (Scahill, 2013: 25–30). In addition, the Obama presidency has expanded the use of drones – unmanned aerial systems which are illegal – and in 2011 the US military carried out hundreds of strikes in six countries, transforming the way Western and primarily American democracy engages in what is still called war. In one particular case – Pakistan – the United States had, by 2011, carried out more than 300 drone strikes since 2004 (see Singer, 2012: 6). Along a parallel track of global policing, the US Defense Strategy for 2008 includes the objective of working with and through like-minded states to “help shrink the ungoverned areas of the world and thereby deny extremists and other hostile parties sanctuary; by helping others police themselves and their regions, we will collectively address threats to the broader international system” (emphasis added) (Department of Defense, 2008: 9–10).

The geopolitics of the imperial  37 Here, the notion of collectivity needs to be looked at critically since the role of the United States is always defined as that of leader, or steward, or more recently, in the context of US-Latin American relations, as the “mentor” (see Kelly, 2013: 19). Security, surveillance and policing both inside and outside have become key elements of an increasingly militarized mentality. Inside the “homeland”, US citizens have been subjected to more intense surveillance through such innovations as the Patriot Act, and naturally the recent exposure of the activities of the National Security Agency in its spying inside the United States and all over the globe. Moreover, one should not forget the official use of torture, as reported by an eleven-member panel convened by the Constitution Project in Washington DC, which concluded that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” (Shane, 2013: 1 and 5). Abroad the so-called un-governed, under-governed and misgoverned areas of the world are incorporated within geostrategic risk management, where, as Pentagon adviser, Barnett (2004: 25) puts it, the United States ought to enforce the rule set for international relations and stipulate which are good states and which are bad states. And it is here that one can find various debates about the posited existence of rogue or failed states. As a way of initiating this section of the paper, I have referred to the notion of an “imperial nexus”. What exactly is meant by this term? First of all, the imperial nexus refers to the way the imperial connects with and overlaps with the racial and the sexual so that to fully comprehend the nature of imperiality we need to link it into a perspective which can illuminate concepts of raciality and sexuality. But before embarking on such a route, we need a clear idea of the difference between imperialism and imperiality. Expressed in broad terms, imperialism and specifically US imperialism may be defined as a matrix of strategy, policy, practice and intervention which seeks to establish and reproduce the conditions for its global power and in particular for its desire and capacity to subordinate societies of the post-colonial periphery, thereby undermining and subverting their political sovereignty. Referring to Golub (2010: 15), we can add that Pax ­Americana has been based on multiple hierarchies, so that in northern Europe, the United States promoted economic development and liberal-democratic states, whilst in northeast Asia, outside Japan, it aided in the setting up and sustaining of “semi-sovereign authoritarian developmental states that it controlled”. In contrast, in the post-colonial periphery, force was consistently deployed to limit the possibilities of revolutionary social transformations and prevent the development of a greater degree of geopolitical autonomy. And, it should be emphasized here, as mentioned in an earlier footnote, that in addition to the use of overt force, the United States deployed a wide range of other more concealed methods of violent intervention to enforce its will.10 An imperialist strategy is essentially developed within the political space of the state, and in recent times, the programme entitled Project for a New American Century was constructed as a design for a century, or perhaps a

38  David Slater little longer, that was to be thoroughly American throughout. The conservative intellectuals associated with the project, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had an important influence on the Bush Administration’s foreign policy and they provide us with one highly pertinent example of the way imperialist strategy is constructed within the institutional space of the state. In contrast to imperialism, imperiality can be approached as a composite term that infers the right, privilege and sentiment of being imperial or of defending ideas of Empire in which the geopolitical invasiveness of Western power, and specifically of the United States is justified. Hence, societies such as the United States harbour imperial discourses that are rooted or sedimented in the history of their geopolitical relations so that an active strategy of imperialist expansion can be discursively sustained through a reliance on or direct appeal to the deeply rooted sense of imperial privilege. And, in fact, there can be a mutually sustaining process whereby an active strategy of imperialism is supported by a reservoir of imperial sentiment, which, in turn, is further reinforced by a reinvigorated imperialist strategy. However, where in society there has been a powerful opposition to war, as was the case with Vietnam, the effectiveness of imperiality is weakened. Much depends on the battle for ideas, or on wars over geopolitical meaning, which are significantly characterized by struggles over what is remembered and what is consigned to oblivion (Mignolo, 2005). Furthermore, the imperial nexus connects in both the inside (home) and the outside (abroad) with racial and gender meanings. Inside the United States, for example, Kennedy (1996), in his analysis of imperial culture and “white male paranoia”, suggests that the disavowal of an imperial presence has been overshadowed by the argument that the United States is an imperial nation in which domestic cultures and mythologies are still shaped by the global workings of empire building. He goes on to posit that the domination of international others has depended on mastering the other at home, and that “the very public emergence of specifically white male paranoia and anger in the United States in recent years reveals the workings of the imperial unconscious of white American manhood” (Kennedy, 1996: 89). This anger feeds into military recruitment which is promoted in part through flooding all modes of entertainment with a strong appeal to the hyper-­masculinity of young men. For Giroux (2004), military activities abroad cannot be separated from the growing militarization of society at home: wars are waged on drugs, social policies are criminalized, incarceration rates soar among the poor, with 50% of inmates being African American, and schools are increasingly modelled after prisons. What is new here, observes G ­ iroux, is that militarization post-9/11 has become naturalized, affecting lives, memories and daily experiences while undermining everything critical and emancipatory about history, justice and the meaning of democracy. Returning to the linkage between imperiality and raciality, as mentioned above, it is worthwhile remembering some of the incisive remarks on race and imperialism made by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of the origins of

The geopolitics of the imperial  39 totalitarianism (Arendt, 1975). She showed quite demonstrably how imperialism necessitated racism as the only possible excuse for its deeds. She wrote that racism has been the powerful ideology of imperialist policies, and the exclusion in principle of the idea of humanity, which constitutes the sole regulating idea of international law, is thoroughly unacceptable. “Race is, she writes, politically speaking not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but its unnatural death” (Arendt, 1975: 157). On a not completely dissimilar track, Foucault (2003: 254–258) argues that when racism broke out it did so when the right to take life was imperative. So racism first develops with colonization or with “colonizing genocide”: it is the “indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed … once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State” (ibid.) And again with more emphasis, Foucault writes “how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations and to kill civilizations” … and the answer is “by appealing to racism” (ibid.). For Foucault, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other … “that is a biological-type relationship” or more specifically, “racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population …” (ibid.). And further, “racism is bound up with the workings of the state that is obliged to use race, to exercise its sovereign power” (ibid.). Remaining for a moment in the nineteenth century, it is clear that the construction of empires went together with an outbreak of militant racism so that one well-known scientist, a certain Robert Knox, wrote that “race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization depends on it” (quoted in Lindqvist, 1998: 125). The irruption of a belligerent racism had many concrete results on the ground; for example, in the United States, about five million of the indigenous American population lived in what is now the United States. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, half a million still remained but by 1891 – at the time of the massacre at Wounded Knee – the native population had plummeted to a quarter of a million, or 5% of the original number of Indians. Faced with these and other related facts, Darwin argued that certain human races are doomed to be exterminated and the liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer made the situation abundantly clear by stating that imperialism has served civilization by clearing the inferior races off the earth (Lindqvist, 1998: 114–115 and 8). In the United States of the nineteenth century, the emergence of a new imperial power was accompanied by a clearly visible racist discourse which to express the matter directly had two variants, which continued into the twentieth century and beyond. In the first place, there was a bellicose discourse, as expressed, for example, by Theodore Roosevelt, who, at the time of the colonial war in the Philippines, averred that the conflict signified “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of

40  David Slater savagery and barbarism” and, he continued, “the warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity” (quoted in Kramer, 2006: 169). The second variant can be found in the writing of President Woodrow Wilson, who in the same year as Theodore Roosevelt; that is, in 1902, wrote that “we must govern … and they must obey as those who are in tutelage” … and further, “they are children and we are men in these matters of government and justice” (Wilson, 1902: 13). This second variant expresses a patronizing, ethnocentric attitude which is deeply rooted in the United States and more generally Western society and which has affected and continues to influence the chemistry of US-third world relations. It is a constitutive component of imperial discourse and Schoultz (1999), for instance, gives us many relevant examples of the continuity of this ethnocentric bias in the history of US-Latin-American encounters. Having highlighted one or two salient points concerning the link or better expressed, interweaving of imperiality and raciality, it is now appropriate to include a few comments on the connections between imperiality, raciality and sexuality. In the case of empire, it has been argued that empire was seen in terms of a “family” in which both women and the inferior races became part of a natural order controlled by benevolent white middle-and upper-class males at home and abroad (Rattansi, 2007: 46). Rattansi (ibid.) goes on to suggest that there was an effeminization of the native in the colony, so, for example, colonized lands were given feminine names, Virginia being one of the most obvious reflections of this tendency. It is possible to link Rattansi’s observation to work on feminism and imperial power which examines the contemporary situation. For example, Schueller (2007), in her analysis of techno-dominance and US imperialism, stresses the point that in relation to the discussion around the nature of Shock and Awe, there is a clear invocation of a hyper-masculine, virile destruction based on technological mastery. The categories are created within an oppressive logic of gender construction which takes us back to the colonial era. For Schueller (2007: 168), in imperial discourse, the adversary is continually portrayed as sexually disempowered and effeminized. The nation, through the phenomenon of techno-dominance, is represented in terms of a virile, masculine body, whereas the adversary is pictured as emasculated and vulnerable. In considering the notorious photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, Schueller states that three features stand out: (a) the obvious pride of the US soldiers posing in some of the photos; (b) the vulnerability of the prisoner’s bodies and (c) the homosexual content of many of the photos. And, for Schueller, “all these features illustrate the brutal techno-sexual dominance that characterises contemporary US imperialism” (Schueller, 2007: 175). She continues by writing that sexuality is the most common trope of imperial domination and that “phallic power defines imperialism”.

The geopolitics of the imperial  41 In Iraq, “the confluence of practices of imperial domination and the gender dynamics of Orientalism created the conditions for sexual torture through humiliation and othering” (Schueller, 2007: 177). Whilst it has to be said that imperialism is not just all about gender and sexuality; nevertheless, sexuality is an important form of imperial control. Connected to sexuality, it is worthwhile noting that in her work on “carnal knowledge and imperial power”, Stoler (2010: xxiv) suggests that imperial security regimes are able to anticipate what needs to be internally controlled  – for example, intimate knowledge with regards to people’s friendships and earlier lives – and correspondingly it is possible to discern a move of the US military towards making the intimate a strategic terrain. So, for example, according to Gregory, there has been an “intrusive intimacy of the biometric systems used by the US military to individualise the Iraqi population” (Gregory, quoted in Stoler, 2010: xxv). Obviously, far more can be written about these themes; my purpose here has been to simply signal the significance of the interconnections between the imperial, the racial and the sexual, for as it might be remarked today’s imperialism needs to be read in all its cultural complexity, and in particular through its racial, sexual and political components.11 Furthermore, it is useful to emphasize the point that the concept of an imperial nexus encourages us to look for the interconnections and overlappings so that in addition to the links between imperiality, raciality and sexuality, the imperial present is also characterized by an imbrication of the domestic and the international, as well as between the centre and the periphery, a theme that will now be briefly touched on. It was Foucault (2003: 103) who on looking back at centre-periphery, West-non-West relations in the sixteenth century, drew our attention to a “boomerang effect” in the sense that whilst colonization, with its techniques and political weapons, transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West. “A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling ­colonization, or an internal colonialism on itself” (Foucault, 2003). Fast-forwarding to the end of the nineteenth century, beginning of the twentieth century, we have the example of the concentration camp, which was first introduced by the Spanish in Cuba; a certain General Valeriano Weyler had by the end of 1897 transferred an estimated 300,000 Cubans into camps, in what was referred to by Spain as a policy of “reconcentration” of the Cuban population during a time of insurgency and war. The British went on to follow this example in the Boer war, in South Africa, incarcerating thousands of Afrikaner farmers, and then forty years later the Nazis intensified and generalized this abhorrent technique of coercive power. A more durable example of a centre-periphery relation that went twoway is described by the American historian McCoy (2009) in his excellent account of policing the imperial periphery and the birth of the National Security State.

42  David Slater At the dawn of the twentieth century, US armed forces captured Manila, a city that had been ruled for 350 years by Spain, and it can be said that for the first time in its history the United States had become both a colonial and an imperial power. However, in the case of the Philippines, which became a US colony from the beginning of the twentieth century until 1946, the United States was faced by a resilient insurgency that required pacification during approximately fifteen years. In this time, the police came to be deployed as a key instrument of state power, and freed from the constraints of the courts and Constitution, the American colonial regime combined new information technologies with military intelligence to create what McCoy (2009: 107) calls “arguably the world’s first ‘surveillance state’”. To realize this objective, the US army created a complex of security forces – the modernized Manila Metropolitan Police, the paramilitary Philippines Constabulary and its own combat intelligence unit, the Division of Military Information – that employed smart-number files photographic identification and the telegraphic transfer of combat intelligence. In addition, it should be noted that in barely five years, the Signal Corps of approximately four hundred men had laid 5,355 miles of landlines and 1,615 miles of undersea cable. McCoy continues by observing that “through the clandestine penetration, close surveillance and centralized intelligence in capital and countryside, the US colonial police penetrated private social space to collect incriminating information on the country’s political elite” (McCoy, 2009: 110). Overall, it can be said that advances in policing inside this Philippine periphery of empire reflected an early expression of the repressive potential of the new information technology. Moreover, not only did colonial conquest go together with making the Philippines a social laboratory for the perfection of US state power but also this particular experience came to play a seminal role in building Washington’s domestic counter-intelligence apparatus and its nascent covert capacity. Finally, it can be noted that “senior US commanders applied lessons learnt in repressing Filipino radical movements to crush a militant miners’ revolt in the West Virginia coalfields  – ­according to McCoy, the only armed uprising against the American state in the twentieth century” (McCoy, 2009: 115).

Re-framing the geopolitics of the imperial: some concluding comments In their follow-up book to Empire, Hardt and Negri (2004: 323), in their text entitled Multitude, state that “today imperial geopolitics has no centre and no outside; it is a theory of internal relations in the global system”. In his consideration of Hardt and Negri, Laclau effectively argues that the “picture of an imperial totality without a centre…. from which internal poles of power would have disappeared…does not convince…since all we have to do is look at the international scene since 9/11” (Laclau, 2005: 241). In the period since 9/11, the United States has acted as a centre of imperial power,

The geopolitics of the imperial  43 and as Coronil (2007: 268) observes historically it is clear that the United States has had an imperial presence in Latin America. What is required from the kind of analysis undertaken by Coronil is to make the US’ imperial presence both more visible and more intolerable. At the beginning of this paper, the theme of intervention and specifically unilateral intervention was introduced, and this theme was linked to the impact of invasiveness which in our analysis is exemplified through the workings of imperial power. In response to those who deny the existence of empire it can be countered that the United States projects its military power globally, its economic interests are global, its cultural reach is global and in many ways it is a more formidable empire than any empire has ever been.12 The most strange thing about it is that its citizens tend not to recognize the fact, even though the Founding Fathers quite openly called the United States an empire; for example, Hamilton declared that the nation was the “embryo of a great empire” (quoted in Hunt, 1987: 25) and Jefferson talked of an Empire of Liberty. Certainly, as Coronil reminds us it is quite unrealistic to attempt to understand the history and geopolitics of Latin America without considering the effects of the projection of US power. On this point, the Argentinian historian Salvatore (2005: 26–27) reminds us of the varied popular sector protests against US interventions (e.g. in Colombia and Bolivia with regards to the “war on drugs”, the imposition of monetarist policies on Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela and territorial occupation in Puerto Rico and Cuba). Salvatore goes on to note that it is important to analyse changes in the type of anti-imperialist protest and also to be aware of the differences between countries with respect to their memory of imperial interventions. In addition, we can also mention the different deployments of US power in Latin ­America; the different kinds of intervention, for example, in the 1950s, as between ­Bolivia on the one hand and Guatemala on the other hand (Slater, 2010). When discussing the geopolitics of the imperial, it is important to remember the factors of change, mutation and process. Rather than talk of the ruins of empire, one emphasizes the process of ruination that continues, as, for example, with the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam (see Stoler and McGranahan, 2013: 1–35). Together with the dynamic of geopolitical change, one needs to highlight the significance of the agents or protagonists of imperial intervention. Instead of approaching the imperial from the traditional Marxist viewpoint of assuming that structures have agency – that structures do things, it would seem more helpful to examine the geopolitical imaginations of the intellectuals who work inside the apparatuses of the state, such as the neo-cons whose input has been quite different from those with a neoliberal persuasion. War, a strong state and a proud defence of America’s posited cultural supremacy have been the hallmark of the neoconservatives (see George, 2008).13 In sum, we are touching an extensive terrain of themes and issues and what I have done in this paper is to signal a few openings and possible points of exploration which can potentially help to renew what is a significant field of enquiry.

44  David Slater

Notes 1 For two complementary texts that deal with “liberal imperialism”, the reader might consult Mehta (1999) and Pitts (2005). For a well-thought out discussion of the relations between liberalism, empire and human rights, see Dahbour (2007). Finally, see Parekh (1997). 2 For Iran and Guatemala, see, for example, Gaddis (2005: 162–171). In addition, for an excellent overview of the geopolitical situation in the Southern Cone countries during the 1970s, see, for example, Corradi, Fagen and Garretón (1992). 3 Here, it can be noted that shortly after the Second World War, the US Secretary of Agriculture, when addressing a Congressional Committee, remarked that “some people are going to have to starve” (Berlan, 1952: 9). 4 I do not want to stress this point too much since obviously the United States remained an imperial power, but in the 1930s there were certain flexibilities, and overall a less authoritarian foreign policy. 5 For an up-to-date overview of the United States, as a “rogue state”, see ­Chomsky and Vltchek (2013). 6 Anderson (2013: 55–56) makes a useful distinction between force and covert violence, and for the latter he lists, inter alia, renting crowds in Iran, subsidies for Afghan warlords or Polish dissidents. Furthermore, he notes that the United States has developed a wide range of methods for enforcing its will, including aerial bombardment, economic sanction, missile attack, naval blockade, torture and assassination. Anderson further observes that “the widespread consent on which American imperial power could rely in the First World was missing in the Third” (ibid.). 7 Williams (1972), in his classic text on American diplomacy, suggests that in the realm of ideas and ideals American policy is guided by three conceptions: (a)  first the humanitarian impulse to help other people; (b) the application of the principle of self-determination at the international level and (c) the idea that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they go about it in the same way as the United States, thus leading to oft uncritical support for Americanization (Williams, 1972: 13). 8 It is sensible to remember that the Latin American Left has had a vibrant history with many achievements of profound political significance, including the ­Cuban Revolution, the government of Salvador Allende, the Sandinista victory, the post-neo-liberal governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, the building of local and regional power, as in Chiapas and the experiments with participatory budgets, of which the most important were developed in the city of Porto Alegre For a stimulating survey of key aspects of the Left in Latin America, see Sader (2011). 9 In the specific case of Iraq, the occupation has generated new forms of disorder which continue to plague that country. Whyte (2007), in his timely analysis of the crimes of neoliberal rule in occupied Iraq, notes that an unknown proportion of Iraqi oil revenue has disappeared into the pockets of contractors and fixers in the form of bribery, over-charging, embezzlement, product substitution, bid rigging and false claims. At least, $12 billion disappeared. In addition, the occupation laid the ground for political disunity and a growing space for the terrorist activities of Al Qaeda linked groups. For a general and thought-provoking examination of the relations between empire and chaos, see Joxe (2002). 10 It is a fact of academic life that whist most authors will hesitantly agree that the United States has used violence to pursue its aims in most parts of the world, there is an implicit reluctance to go with the theme of state terror. For a useful although somewhat neglected text, see Gareau (2004), and any of Chomsky’s contributions to the theme, for example Chomsky and Vltchek (2013).

The geopolitics of the imperial  45 11 There are many citations one can take from Said, but the following seems particularly apposite: There is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within ­A merican culture….without also apprehending the imperial contest itself. This, I would say, is a cultural fact of extraordinary political as well as interpretative importance, yet it has not been recognized as such in cultural and literary theory and is routinely circumvented or occluded in cultural discourses. (Said, 1993: 66) 12 With respect to military power, it can be noted that in the context of expenditure, by 2007 US defence spending came to 45% of the world total, whereas in 1986 it was 28.2% (Golub, 2010: 84). As far as economic prowess is concerned, it may be noted that as of 2010 US manufacturing output accounted for a fifth of global output; also of the world’s 500 largest corporations 132 are headquartered in the United States, twice that of any other country – see Wikipedia, The Economy of the United States, 2014. 13 The main difference between the neoconservative and neoliberal approaches concerns the fact that neoliberals place the key focus of their perspective on the market and possessive individualism. In contrast, the neo-cons prioritise questions of defence, security and traditional culture and exhibit a stronger emphasis on US nationalism.

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46  David Slater Formations, School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press; Oxford: James Currey, 241–271. Dahbour, Omar (2007) “Hegemony and Rights: On the Liberal Justification for ­Empire.” In A. Dawson and M. J. Schueller (eds.) Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 105–130. Department of Defense (2008) National Defense Strategy. Washington D.C.: ­Department of Defense. Eisenstein, Zillah (2007) Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy. London: Zed Books. Foucault, Michel (2003) Society Must Be Defended. London: Allen Lane, The ­Penguin Press. Gaddis, John L. (2005) The Cold War. London: Penguin Books. Gareau, Frederick H. (2004) State Terrorism and the United States. London: Zed Books. George, Susan (2008) Hijacking America: How the Secular and Religious Right Changed What Americans Think. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gill, Stephen (2012) “Towards a Radical Concept of Praxis: Imperial ‘common sense’ Versus the Post-Modern Prince.” Millennium, vol. 40, no. 3, 505–524. Gilroy, Paul (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Giroux, Henry A. (2004) “War on Terror: the militarising of public space and culture in the United States.” Third Text, vol. 18, no. 4, 211–221. Golub, Philip S. (2010) Power, Profit & Prestige, a History of American Imperial Expansion. London: Pluto Press. Guardiola-Rivera, Oscar (2010) What If Latin America Ruled the World? London: Bloomsbury. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004) Multitude. London: Penguin Books. Hunt, Michael H. (1987) Ideology and US Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT and ­London: Yale University Press. Jameson, Fredric R. (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Joxe, Alain (2002) Empire of Disorder. New York: Semiotext. Kaplan, Amy (2002) The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture. ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kelly, General John F. (2013) Posture Statement, of the United States Marine Corps Commander, United States Southern Command, before the 113th Congress, Senate Armed Services Committee, 19 March 2013. [On line. Available at: https:// www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Kelly_03-13-14.pdf. Accessed on: 15 September 2013]. Kennedy, Liam (1996) “Alien Nation: White Male Paranoia and Imperial Culture in the United States.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 87–100. Kiernan, Victor G. (1974) Marxism and Imperialism. London: Edward Arnold. Kramer, Paul A. (2006) “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the US Empire: the Philippine-American War as a Race War.” Diplomatic History, vol. 30, no. 2, 169–210. Laclau, Ernesto (2001) “Democracy and the Question of Power.” Constellations, vol. 8, no. 1, 3–14. Laclau, Ernesto (2005) On Populist Reason. London and New York: Verso Books.

The geopolitics of the imperial  47 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. ­London and New York: Verso Books. Lefort, Claude (1988) Democracy and Political Theory. London: Oxford University Press. Lindqvist, Sven (1998) Exterminate all the Brutes. London: Granta Books. McCoy, Alfred W. (2009) “Policing the Imperial Periphery: Philippine Pacification and the Rise of the US National Security State.” In A. W. McCoy and F. A. ­Scarano (eds.) Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 106–115. McNamara, Robert S. (1995) In Retrospect. New York: Vintage Books. Mehta, Uday S. (1999) Liberalism and Empire. Chicago, IL: The University of ­Chicago Press. Mignolo, Walter D. (2005) Colonialidad Global, Capitalismo y Hegemonía Epistemica. In R. Salvatore (comp.) Culturas Imperiales. Buenos Aires: Beatrice Viterbo, 55–88. Milne, Seumas (2012) The Revenge of History. London and New York: Verso. Mouffe, Chantal (2000) The Democratic Paradox. London and New York: Verso. Parekh, Bhikhu (1997) “The West and Its Others.” In K. Ansell-Pearson, B. Parry and J. Squires (eds.) Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History. New York: St Martins Press, 173–193. Pitts, Jennifer (2005) A Turn to Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rancière, Jacques (1995) On the Shores of Politics. London and New York: Verso. Rattansi, Ali (2007) Racism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sader, Emir (2011) The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left. London and New York: Verso. Said, Edward W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Said, Edward W. (2003) Orientalism, With a New Preface. London: Penguin Books. Salvatore, Ricardo (2005) “Introduccion: Re-pensar el imperialismo en la era de la globalizacion.” In R. Salvatore (comp.) Culturas Imperiales. Buenos Aires: ­Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 11–35. Scahill, Jeremy (2013) Dirty Wars, the World is a Battlefield. London: Profile Books. Schoultz, Lars (1999) Beneath the United States. Cambridge, MA and London: ­Harvard University Press. Schueller, Malini J. (2007) “Techno-Dominance and Torture Gate: The Making of US Imperialism.” In A. Dawson and M. J. Schueller (eds.) Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 162–188. Sen, Amartya (2009) “Pip was Right: Nothing is So Finely Felt as Injustice. And there the Search Begins.” The Guardian, 14 July, p 26. Shane, Scott (2013) “U.S. Tortured Detainees after 9/11, Report Says.” International Herald Tribune, 16 April, p. 1 and p. 5. Simpson, Brad (2012) “Bernath Lecture: The United States and the Curious History of Self – Determination.” Diplomatic History, vol. 36, no. 4, 675–694. Singer, Peter W. (2012) “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?” New York Times, 21 January [On line. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/opinion/ sunday/dodrones-undermine-democracy.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed on: 13 September 2013].

48  David Slater Slater, David (2010) “Rethinking the Imperial Difference: Towards an Understanding of US – Latin American Encounters.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2, 185–206. Stoler, Ann Laura (2010) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Stoler, Ann Laura and McGranahan, Carole (2013) “The Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains.” In A. L. Stoler, C. McGranahan and P. C. Perdue (eds.) Imperial Formations, School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press; Oxford: James Currey, 3–44. The White House (2010) National Security Strategy of the United States. Washington, DC: The White House. Williams, William A. (1972) The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Wilson, Woodrow (1902) ‘The Ideals of America.’ Atlantic Quarterly, December. Zinn, Howard (1996) The People’s History of the United States. New York: Longman.

2 Social liberalism and global domination Lessons for Latin America and Europe José Maurício Domingues Neoliberalism and social liberalism Neoliberalism appeared many years ago as a project to which originally nobody paid much attention. It was born out of the efforts of many economists concentrated in this intellectual task. Hayek stood out among them, as is known, but many other important academics took part in its intellectual and practical articulation. Several years passed until neoliberals came to state power, since Keynesianism and the Welfare State, developmentalism and corporatist forms of organizing social policy limited the space in which its doctrines could expand and exercise concrete political drive. It eventually achieved world hegemony, with the period of its rise starting with the dictatorships of Pinochet and Videla, in Chile and Argentina, respectively, and later with Reagan and Thatcher in the United States and Britain. With the growing crisis – real or imagined, financial and/or p ­ olitical – of K ­ eynesianism, of Third World developmentalism and the encompassing ­social policies of the Welfare State, neoliberalism managed to achieve hegemony and redraw the world intensely according to its vision. This included economic policies, of which the so-called Washington Consensus ended up being the best expression. Moreover, successive generations of “reforms” have since then tried and created institutional conditions for its implementation, from privatizations to the refashioning of judicial systems. But they also implied, as shown by Foucault ([1978–1979] 2004), a “bio-­political” conception of people, which should be understood as “firms” or “enterprises”, rationally, systematically, projected, subjectively closed in a career and life trajectory, with investment plans and cost-benefits calculations. ­Neoliberalism moved therefore between a worldview, a political project and public policies (see Anderson, 1995; Harvey, 2007). Neoliberalism has already been analysed many times in its distinct currents. It is not the intention of this article to resume and deepen this path of investigation, but rather to inquire into what has happened in the ­aftermath of its consolidation as economic policy, although some important parts of the world have only partially submitted to its prescriptions (as with China, other countries like Russia have retreated from its acceptance after

50  José Maurício Domingues absolutely disastrous processes). In fact, the goal of this text is to look into what we can investigated about the successor to neoliberalism: that is to say, social liberalism. This is not necessarily – and in fact, not entirely – opposed to neoliberalism, sharing many elements and perspectives with it, but rests no longer content with the affirmation of the market and the rationalism of the firm in all dimensions, mixing economics and “bio-politics” in an even broader and more subtle way. The latter in particular expanded with social liberalism, which shrewdly knew how to respond to fundamental societal demands, thereby consolidating the hegemony of liberalism in the world. If  neoliberalism, evincing strong elements of continuity with liberalism – but, as I shall argue, discarding what was in principle its “rights” claim – was decisive for the broadening of what many still call the “American Empire”, social liberalism is crucial for its administration, above all in regions of the world in which popular demands come forward and the theme of poverty stands out (Panitch and Gindin, 2012; Domingues, 2015). As we shall see, the World Bank is the key institution in this process. It  i­ nvented or found ways to draw on innovations that turn up in the socalled “Global South”. This is especially true with regard to conditional monetary cash transfers, particularly in Latin America, Africa and South Asia – ­including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Nicaragua and almost all other Latin American countries, as well as Turkey, Burkina Faso, ­Bangladesh, Indonesia, Cambodia, South Africa, Morocco, Malawi, India, Nigeria, the Philippines and Yemen. More widely, focal and sectorialized policies are decisive for its articulation, which fragments and reconstitutes the social tissue aiming at its vertical functioning, without contraposition exactly to that perspective that we call “entrepreneurial”. It responds to what can be defined as the tendencies and dynamics of the third phase of global modernity. I will begin by discussing its concrete functioning, going on to some classical topics of sociology and philosophy in order to frame it, and concluding with its localization in contemporary modernity and in global domination systems.

From rights to particularizing policies Global social policy cannot be described in a homogeneous way all over the world. There are historical and contemporary variations that are very relevant. In the West we find, since the end of the nineteenth and during the twentieth centuries, especially in its second half, a tendency towards the universalization of social rights – also as a project of liberal social democracy, a classical reference to which is the well-known work of Marshall ([1950] 1964) – although on the other hand corporatist systems, such as the German one, have also played a decisive role. This sort of construction of social welfare suffered defeat to a large extent in the United States, where it is residual. Corporatism was also the way through which Latin America and the Arab world developed their social policies, differently from socialist

Social liberalism and global domination  51 countries, which aimed at more universal social policies, as in the case of the Soviet Union and Cuba, even though China had clearly separated its rural and urban populations, the latter deserving broader social rights. The market was thus the main original axis of the modern project, alongside civil and in part political citizenship, in the welfare states reaching out to social citizenship, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Very often, however, the theme of affirmative action turned up in several places, such as in India, due to a heterogeneous social fabric, cut across by deep inequalities (in this case, caste-based). Rights with a universal character, in any case, at least rhetorically and as telos, were kept as a state goal in most countries. Since the crisis of the 1970s, the situation has changed. It is not rights or their projection that matters. At stake is not equality, but equity (Domingues, 2006a). In this regard, what matters is not treating everyone in the same way in the pursuit of a sort of justice capable of creating a common, in other words, universal, “status”. The issue is to generate policies that treat distinct actors, unequal in their predicament, in an unequal way. Nobody expressed this vision in a more straightforward and argued manner than Amartya Sen (1999), whose perspective was put forward directly, albeit implicitly, against the developmentalism that would have, it is supposed, led just to frustration. According to this sort of standpoint, electing the mostly needy would be the point. Targeted policies would therefore be the solution, drawing on the basics of compensatory policies – in other words, the protection of the most “vulnerable” – that were introduced in the face of the “structural adjustment” promoted by the Washington Consensus. These targeted policies were recommended by those very international financial organizations that advocated structural adjustment, with their reversion expected in the long run. It was not by chance that Sen got a prize and a tribute from the World Bank. If his decisive contribution to the establishment of the United Nations (UN) Human Development Index (HDI) and the Millennium Goals to combat extreme poverty cannot be overlooked, his role in the development of policies for the poor – extreme poor – must not be forgotten. Both perspectives, in fact, blend to a large extent. The Brazilian “Bolsa Família” programme has become the most important in the world in this regard, embracing millions of families and surpassing others, such as the “Oportunidades” in Mexico. Hence, it works as a model for the World Bank, as the Brazilian government proudly boasts. This programme is the best example of the Latin American “social police”. India too, with its massive number of poor people, intends to develop a similar programme – based on direct cash transfers, like the “Bolsa Família” – although it has to struggle with problems of statistics and administration (Jhabvala and Standing, 2010; Vyasulu, 2010; Ghosh, 2011).1 In health care, moreover, the rejection of the universalization of services provided by the state has become a crucial theme, since its provisions would restrict it to basic attention and general treatment for the public. That is all the access the poor would have. The others, of “greater complexity” and

52  José Maurício Domingues more expensive, would be on offer in the market for those who could pay for them. Reasonable cover could thereby be placed on the horizon, but not universal access as an automatic fallout of citizenship. With education the same thing has happened, with basic education becoming a state obligation (and means to “human capital” formation) while higher education is in the market for the middle and upper classes to buy. In all these themes, equity stands out, not equality, as in fact the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made clear. This is not the only area in which there have been important changes in the policies of these institutions. Others came up, under the pressure of public opinion in many countries and the action of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They related to the demands of specific groups or referred to specific issues. In the first place were indigenous peoples, in particular in the Americas and Australia, as well as in other areas of Asia and Africa, besides the environmental theme, often combining with the former and generating opportunities once again for the development of sectorialized policies in relation to specific collectivities. The case of women followed next, with social policies that aimed at their promotion in a world dominated by men and sexism, once again treating unequal persons unequally and concentrating on women the benefits and/or control of the concrete implementation of public policies. In some part, albeit less intensively, racial and ethnic questions around the world were also converted into the object of sectorialized equity policies. Some, rather limited level of participation, however, was in addition placed on the agenda of these organizations. Curiously, there is still very little research about this process. With regard to indigenous peoples and the environment, the evolution of the World Bank is more researched, but as to the other themes this is by no means the case. Most studies are dedicated to its development projects since the 1940s, along the lines of support to infrastructure, industrialization of agriculture, lending, etc. (Goldman, 2006; Pereira, 2011). The special exception is the work of Hall (2007), which analyses several of these policies, the passage from only economics to environmental themes and from there to social policing, including the tensions between the bank and the US government. However, not all policies win his attention, and he refrains in particular from stating possible and necessary conclusions, either specific or – indeed, even less so – theoretical, about the meaning and historical importance of this subtle evolution. Other discussions deal more generically with the issue, acknowledging that there is something new under the sun. This is the case, above all, with Hardt and Negri (2000), who propose the thesis of a deterritorialized empire in which states play no decisive role, or at least share with other agents in the administration of the global space and of bio-politics. The very generation and management of life and subjectivity would be the key elements of contemporary capitalism, in a way that fragments social life, although the “multitude”, a mix of universality and singularity, comes forth as the subject that will eventually close the trajectory of the empire.

Social liberalism and global domination  53 From another angle, local instead of global, with specific reference to India, Chatterjee (2004) criticized state policies of social citizenship and pointed to the role of particular and circumscribed themes and moral identities which concrete subjects would be capable of engendering, in contraposition to the “governmentality” exercised by the state (a manner of rule, not “domination”, he affirms, which consists for me in a rhetorical rather than an actually conceptual statement, insofar as the latter is a component of the former). We need to recognize that this was not a movement deployed only from the top-down. In social dynamics, several collectivities made their demands heard in increasingly particularized ways, newly or by finding opportunities and spaces to make them more visible than before. The forms of democratic participation of these groups have also become stronger and found receptivity nationally and in the face of some international organizations, with a widening of what some are prone to define as a “global civil society” (Kaldor, 2003). A multiplication of issues addressed was the result. On the other hand, the idea of “entrepreneurship” was kept central in all these policies. In fact, they look for collectivities as objects, passive or active. But it is very common that the solution ends up being the promotion of entrepreneurial activity, at least rhetorically, of the beneficiaries of such policies, in particular when it is the combat of poverty that is at stake. In this respect, the combination between social liberalism and neoliberalism is plain to see, in that the former remains attached to the latter, entertaining a complementary relationship for a good while, beyond the pure and simple affirmation of the market, but never denying and especially keeping it as the kernel of social development. The clearest example, a pioneer inspiring programme or contributions to programmes that have followed, is obviously the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh that lends money to the very poor, assuming that it is women who receive the benefit – concretely much more complicated, although this is a theme that is usually to be found in all ­anti-poverty social policies at present. It intends that an individual would leave a situation of privation by becoming an entrepreneur in a new and rationalized way of spreading and promoting Third World “self-­employment”, in a Latin American, African or Asiatic version, with high costs, including debt (­Karim, 2008; Ghosh, 2013).2

Individualism, particularism and universalism, pluralism and complexity The individualist character of liberal thought is more than established. This is reproduced in neoliberalism although, according to that worldview, institutional and legal issues that allow for social life and the very creation or preservation of freedom should not be overlooked. The same occurred with the way in which the rationality of entrepreneurial behaviour was understood, since it demands a highly predictable environment. All these

54  José Maurício Domingues are themes related to global “governance” and the legal and social reforms promoted by international organizations in recent decades. This sort of perspective conjures up, on the other hand, a rather pronounced abstract universalism: the rational individual (as well as the basic institutional forms that guarantee an optimal environment for her behaviour) is universal and cuts across all regions and countries (regardless of her historical prevalence in the West). Despite national borders, she should be seen as a figure that has finally found in the modern, global world the concrete possibilities for its realization. This is in fact suggested by Hayek ([1944] 1979), with his teleology of historical development: we could say that there is something such as the essence of human beings, but this is revealed only in modernity, when the concrete forms for its social embodiment come true. He believes that economic development, allowed for by the freedom of action of the ­individual, can thereby happen in a consistent manner, with Europe and the United States launching themselves in the process, in spite of the threats to human freedom that the growth of the state engendered during the twentieth century with the emergence of a new type of servitude. In a way, a process similar to that which took place in nineteenth-century Europe unfolds (see Castel, [1995] 1999), albeit in a somewhat more limited manner. While at that time liberalism had to cope with the permanence of “pauperism” – despite the establishment of the principles of liberal capitalist economy, and in fact due to its lack of success in solving it, poverty remained and was an awkward issue – it is recognized today that deep poverty is a global problem, which it is necessary to address. It is not that liberalism cannot solve it in the long run. But it is admitted that those who are too poor need basic conditions to rise to the position of entrepreneurs. For that they have to be treated in a different way from other sectors of society. It is not equality that is at stake, but rather equity. It is with this sort of perception that societies were divided into specific collectivities, with particular identities and, by the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, increasingly closed within nation-states but also from an international standpoint. Social classes are excluded from these identities, on the other hand, which could problematize especially capitalism, or at least put breaks to its workings and the exploitative relations that characterize it. This is a topic that liberalism in the United States has projected already for a long time, intellectually and politically, with private foundations in that country playing a clear role in its articulation and diffusion, first at a national, then at a global level (Herz, 1989; Domhoff, 2010). Anderson (1998) praised nationalism as a way of affirming modern universalism, which promotes what he called “open serialities”. He opposed them to ethnic identities, which share, according to him, “bound serialities”. Chatterjee (2004) in his references got closer to the topic I am dealing with here, attacking nationalism and pointing out that Marshallian social rights already evinced a tension in their construction, since it was more difficult to define them universally, thereby making them concretely universal

Social liberalism and global domination  55 (in fact, nationalizing them, we could say). He therefore claimed priority for the bound serialities of morally defined popular communities, which become more or less sharply defined targets for state-based social policies and with their relations with NGOs (see Domingues, 2012, 2013). Chatterjee interprets, in an ­anti-state mood typical of much of Indian intellectuals, far-reaching processes, which spread out through all – or almost all – countries of the contemporary world. That is to say, if liberalism emphasized a mix of individualism and civil rights, with its social-democratic version doing the same despite difficulties of definitions and practices, and the social rights that ­expanded civil rights (in some way political rights, which were never at the core of l­ iberal thought or were somehow rejected by it), what is being outlined today is something very different. Within each country and transversally, in global terms, what comes up is a mixture of individualism and identity and social particularisms. While before, therefore, universalized rights, at least in their concretization within the nation, were the telos for the social police, what is envisioned today are specific policies for each social group – in their isolation vis-à-vis the others. This is the social face of contemporary liberalism, overcoming and being combined with neoliberalism in its purest form. Such groups can be defined in a more or less active or passive manner. In fact, many of them emerged due their own efforts, without links with projects of the ruling groups. This finds a visible expression in the councils created by the Brazilian 1988 Constitution, in which several themes and collectivities were selected as axes for participatory democracy, which complemented conventional representative democracy. Women and homosexuals, ethnic and racial groups, youth and those of advanced age, among others, are collectivities that express the increasing level of complexity and social pluralism of the contemporary world. Other groups and social movements deal with specific, also pluralized themes. They are not the outcome of a self-centred activity. On the contrary, they interact in their formation with the state, public policies, NGOs, churches, classes, unions, other movements and international organizations. Also the social question, not of inequality but poverty, especially deep poverty, is a theme that was brought to the fore by broader social struggles that ended up inevitably forcing it on the state without, however, a rupture that privileged its treatment as essentially passive, insulated from other social sectors. This was a decisive intellectual and political construction for the contemporary world, in identity as well social police and development terms. In some cases, it is much more hierarchical and demands passivity, typical of the treatment of poverty, which takes up elements of philanthropy launched by the state from the top-down. It includes a certain definition of who the deserving poor are and those who are not (through “conditionalities”); in other cases, it implies the active participation of these collectivities in the elaboration of public policies, in a more or less participatory way. Not all countries in the world are under the influence of this sort of politics which affects especially those that affiliate somehow with the liberal

56  José Maurício Domingues tradition, in Latin America or Asia (India – yes, China – no, for instance, while Japan has recently started contemplating this possibility), whereas Africa also has such policies as a reference. Europe, in the medium term, at least in some of its southern countries, can end up taking them up. The United States, for a long while now, is addressing its poor population on a reduced scale with specific and very restricted policies (with an emphasis on basic food), besides having, at least since the 1970s, developed a strong “identity politics”, particularizing through social movements and public policies. In any case, this is at present a fundamental reference for global policies and for the understanding each one has of his/her identity, of what it means to be an agent – as a member of a group, especially closed, not of a broader collectivity, whether as citizens, of a class, nationally integrated – a phenomenon whose scaffolding it is necessary to point out here, at least briefly. The backdrop for this new way of thinking about social life and the very production of life and subjectivity is found in long-term evolutionary processes, as well as on the more limited evolution of modern civilization (see Domingues, 2006a, 2012). The first two phases of the development of ­modernity – liberal/colonial and later state organized – had homogenizing projects at their core, whether looking for domination or searching for emancipation. These were also ways of dealing with and trying to reduce social complexity. Today, this process is no longer possible: the level of social complexity, which implies a high level of pluralism, in terms of individual and collective subjectivity, does not allow for its capturing simply by projects of modernizing homogenization unfolded by modernizing moves, launched by collectivities of any kind, that have as their goal a radical ­homogenization of social life. This is what makes plausible, albeit problematic, the concentration on bound serialities. It is necessary to be careful, though, with the absolute practical valorization of this kind of collectivity, since the impossibility of homogenization of social life in a more radical manner does not mean that it cannot be partially reached in a number of fields, with positive emancipatory effects on social life. It always has a combination of open and bound serialities, built in variable ways that answered for the social fabric and the dynamic of modernity. This remains the case, with less room for the former, but without the balance between universalism and particularism being out of necessity totally turned to the latter.

Public policies beyond social liberalism? We have seen then that equity-based public policies have become crucial at present and that they come along and sometimes mix with sectorialized policies, directed to specific collectivities. The “poor” are the exact node of junction of such policies. In fact, when they encompass – as in the case of the Brazilian “Bolsa Família”, the Colombian “Familias en Acción” or the Mexican “Oportunidades”, as well as in principle in India – a huge amount of people, they look like something that would almost be universal.3 It is,

Social liberalism and global domination  57 however, a mistake to see them thus. They have poor families in focus and not really the universal citizen, do not appear as social rights but rather as some sort of state gift, which has a far-away, but actual clientelist element. Although in practice things are less clear, with the beneficiaries of the programme identified by local committees, for instance (Domingues, 2013; Rodríguez Ortiz, 2016). It is instructive that a rumour about the end of the Bolsa Família due to a sudden decision by President Dilma Rousseff has led thousands of people, during a single weekend, to attempt to withdraw their money from the banks before government was expected to take it, ending the programme. The “Asignación Universal por Hijo”, a similar Argentine programme, is not universal either, since it is also directed at the poor and its object remains families. It is, however, more general and less conditional: it does not define collectivities directly cut out by the state, depending on direct demand of families and tuning therefore more directly to citizens (Neri et al., 2010). On the other hand, Latin American governments are in many cases and moments somewhat further than social liberalism in the strict sense of the term, by means of democratization and increasing inclusion promoted by its sectorialized policies. They do not, however, break with it despite the tensions that came about with some groups due to projects that extracted natural resources (above all, mega-mining) in the region. An argument in favour of maintaining this type of targeted policy is very obvious and has economic and human plausibility. It allows you to reach those who need more such monetary help, especially because the programmes are not too expensive, in a situation in which, it is supposed, states do not have enough resources to embrace everyone with universal p ­ olicies – which would also be unfair by wasting much needed resources for the poorest people on those who do not actually need them. Another argument would be high social complexity, which prevents the state from addressing everything it has to if it does not carefully select its goals and strategies that are lost with universal policies. This brings up especially the multiplicity of sectorialized polices, demanded by collectivities with different identities and interests, increasingly particularized, to a great extent a reality difficult to deal with. If these two arguments are not absurd, there are on the other hand social, political and moral themes that need to be framed in another way. It is possible, and necessary, to think of homogenizing policies and common social status, that have the citizen-worker as their subject of universal rights. If a particularizing and heterogenizing state offensive was at stake with regard to those policies, we would then focus on a universalizing and homogenizing offensive. The mix, lending concreteness to a system of complex solidarity (Domingues, [2006b] 2007), is what comes forth for an advanced programme of social reforms, by and large in Latin America and the world. Resources exist and it is mandatory that they are simply mobilized. Thereby, we actually move beyond social liberalism, towards something closer to social democracy and its more open serialities, especially in its citizen version (non-corporatist). In this regard, it is also necessary to think

58  José Maurício Domingues that the point is not to compress more particular serialities, although we must reject any essentialization of their attributes, since these are all social constructions, and as such supple and prone to change. In any case, there was a strong criticism in the 1970s–1980s of the lack of recognition of these particular elements of social identities. In fact, much of critical social  theory during the twentieth century was directed to “logocentric” ­operations that compressed social reality through concepts and policies that do not allow for the flourishing of diversity, consisting in one of the key, albeit non-­exclusive, elements of the systems of domination during that period (Domingues, 2006a). This perspective must be sustained, opening space to identity struggles and the varied interests that we can find in each and every national society and cut across them. There is no reason, however, to stop there, reifying particularities and reasoning as if homogenizing national and global elements had never, or no longer have, an important role to play. On the contrary, in a situation in which policies of domination and their governmentality aspects are based on social fragmentation, it is the construction of a complex solidarity that combines heterogeneity and ­homogeneity, especially if such elements appear in an active rather than passive form that we should consider and promote. Today, in Europe, we see the left on the defensive due to the dismantling of the welfare state in some or large measure, depending on the country, and of labour legislation, its flexibilization, in a very general way. It is as if suddenly the defence of the achievements of social democracy were all that should mobilize this political current. This is not true, nor should it be viewed so, but it is necessary to recognize that these were far-reaching civilizational achievements. It is not a matter of restricting oneself to the construction of the welfare state. Yet, globally, establishing a shared social citizenship, potentially universal, is an element that would stand in opposition to the projects of domination and the construction of citizenship that cuts out society as incommensurable collectivities and demands and leads to fragmentation. Moreover, it is not a matter of demanding the copy of previous social-democratic models, but rather of building projects of a more global character, with some regional and national autonomy, as it happened in Latin America in the last few decades (Pereira da Silva, 2010). We therefore need to open such supposedly incommensurable particularities and build a solidarity that acknowledges specificities, at the same time recognizing that we belong to the human species and to modern national societies, while they furnish the main frame of the concretization of rights through a strong and broad concept of citizenship. Evidently, the themes of international domination are not exhausted by this specific and subtle combination of social liberalism. They include development and underdevelopment, dependency and imperialism, control of intellectual and ideological, scientific and technological production circuits, among the many other elements that constitute inequalities and asymmetries of the modern global system. It is mandatory to combat them in all

Social liberalism and global domination  59 their aspects in the search for a fairer global society. The management of ­social life such as I have portrayed here, in any case plays its fundamental role in the articulation of public policies and of individual and collective subjectivity. Against it, we need to look for ways that can lead us to its criticism and emancipatory outcomes. Moreover, the proposal is not that we stop at rights as the means through which to battle inequalities and domination, since it is necessary to move much further than this. With regard to social policies and the reconfiguration of the social tissue, one must not overlook the importance of the change of standpoint in the last decades. By way of conclusion, we can resume and deepen, therefore, the interrogation of how critical theory is positioned along the metamorphosis of modernity. Originally, with Marx ([1867] 1987), in its foundational moment, critical theory tried to show how, behind the apparently fair wage labour relations under capital – and partly truly, since labour power is sold at its fair price – there were hidden deep and regular relations of exploitation. Marx was moreover very clear about the global character of the capitalist system, although he had an optimistic vision of its penetration in all countries of the world, which offered, in the long run, conditions for a planetary communism. This has corresponded to the first phase of modernity, in the nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth century, in which the market, as a reality and as telos was projected as the main pillar of social life, colonial and imperial expansion implying a stronger state, capable of playing such a civilizatory mission, at the end of which all countries and regions would have the market as the homogenizing mechanism. The second phase of modernity, since the 1930s, passing through the processes of decolonization, till the new crisis of the system in the 1970s, had the state and a more general effort of homogenization as its global projection. Adorno and Horkheimer ([1944–1945] 1984), among others, put great emphasis on the homogenization of the world – in fact, in their case, concretely only the West and the Soviet world – by means of reason. In its “logocentrism”, it did not recognize anything that did not simply reproduce it in the real world (destroying what escaped its operations, which colonialism, it is relevant to note, had already pushed forward in a large scale outside of Europe, including in the United States). In a certain way, it is as if such authors refracted the activities of the state, wherefrom an offensive was more clearly launched by a reason that intended to organize, more deeply and by means of more diverse mechanisms, national societies.4 In the period we happen to live in, under the aegis of the third phase of modernity, the complexity of social life becomes so high that it is not possible to think of systems of domination as fundamentally homogenizing. Even emancipatory forces share the same characteristic, shown to be so due to its clearly global reach, with the heritage of the several civilizations becoming more salient. Social liberalism manages therefore to render itself, very astutely, simultaneously as homogenizing, through entrepreneurship, and fragmenting, by means of targeted and sectorialized policies.

60  José Maurício Domingues Critical theory, recognizing and embracing social complexity, especially from the standpoint of the collectivities that aspire to emancipation, cannot allow itself to be captured by an excessive particularization of social life. We must know how to combine particularity and universality so that we can unfold a project capable of answering to the challenges that we face us during the twentieth-first century.

Notes 1 See the panorama and the arguments weaved in Ferreira et al. (2009). This World Bank “research report” offers detail data and social liberal arguments in favour of targeted policies against poverty, as well as its links with “human capital”, health and education. It serves as backdrop of several moments of this article. For an opposite and critical view, see Lavinas (2013). Rodríguez Ortiz (2014) analysed in detail the World Bank’s position on this theme and Latin American cases, as well as the cash transfer programmes in the United State, India and China. 2 What this means in terms of “petty commodity production” and self-­exploitation can be seen, with reference to Africa and south Asia – while this is a very wellknown phenomenon also in Latin America Latin – in Harriss-White (2012). 3 By the end of 2010 direct cash transfer programmes in Latin America reached 113 million people, that is to say, 19% of the region’s population, an extraordinary number from any angle, although the transferred values are by and large very small and its pull on the gross domestic product (GDP) is also very modest (e.g. 0.50 in the case of Brazil) (CEPAL, 2010). 4 Although Foucault (e.g. [1978–1979] 2004) had timely shown that the state, in some crucial aspects of social life, was already busy with that through “governmentality” mechanisms since the nineteenth century.

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62  José Maurício Domingues Pereira, João Marcio Mendes (2011) O Banco Mundial como ator político, intelectual e financeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Pereira da Silva, Fabricio (2010) Vitórias na crise. Trajetórias das esquerdas ­latino-americanas. Rio de Janeiro: Ponteio. Rodríguez Ortiz, María Elena (2014) O enfrentamento da pobreza numa era global: o Banco Mundial, Brasil, Índia e outros casos. PhD Thesis in Sociology, Rio de Janeiro, IESP-UERJ. Rodríguez Ortiz, María Elena (2016) “Social liberalismo e os programas de renda condicionada na América Latina.” In F. Pereira da Silva and R. Nóbrega (eds.) Estudos de teoria social e América Latina. Novos debates e perspectivas. Rio de Janeiro: Ponteio. Sen, Amartya (1999) Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Vyasulu, Vinod (2010) “Brazil’s ‘Fome Zero’ Strategy: Can India Implement Cash Transfers?” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 45, nos. 26–27, 89–91 and 93–95.

3 Euro-Latin American interregionalism in the new post-Cold War geopolitical order Heriberto Cairo

As noted in the Introduction to this volume, regionalization was the answer to the limitations of the state in order to regulate the market to maximize accumulation. As far as the geopolitical region is a larger space than the state, there are more opportunities to control the financial capital in these greater agglomerates. Interregionalism is, in part, a similar answer to the same problem, but it has to do also with the fight for supremacy in the world-system. Interregional alliances allow regional blocs to have better chances to impose their geopolitical view and strategies. Finally, interregionalism emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War geopolitical order and it is initially linked to European Union (EU) foreign policy. Interregionalism does not function indiscriminately all over the world from the EU, but rather in relation to other organized regions: Latin America and the Caribbean are without a doubt the first serious EU’s attempt to construct an interregional conglomerate. Although it is possible to trace back the origins of interregionalism to the 1970s, when the Lomé Convention, delineating the EU policy towards the ACP countries, was signed (Gardini and Malamud, 2018: 3). Sánchez Bajo (1999: 938), in one of the first papers about the relations between the ­MERCOSUR and the EU wrote that interregional (in her own terms) “interacted with the shaping of regionalism as well as with economic globalisation”. Those days of dispute between United States and EU for Latina America, MERCOSUR looked at itself in the mirror of the EU, and the EU wanted to conform ­MERCOSUR with its own appearance. Interregionalism was born in this way, as we shall see later, as a response to the growing globalization. The EU, as the more successful experiment of regionalism, has been essential for the development of interregionalism, although it is only a relatively recent foreign policy, and, obviously the EU has more foreign policies than this. In fact, there are foreign policies directed to different spatial sets: “enlargement in the core area of Europe; stabilization in the so-called ­neighbourhood area; bilateralism with great powers; and interregionalism with respect to other organized regions” (Hettne and Söderbaum, 2005: 535, emphasis added is mine). The geopolitical consequences of this polyphonic policies are sometime contradictory: a space of concentric circles around the

64  Heriberto Cairo core powers of the EU and subordinated to them (particularly Germany) in Eastern and Southern Europe and North Africa, product of realist foreign policies, and interregionalism elsewhere, in a liberal cooperative style. This chapter seeks to understand the role of Europe and Latin America in the post-Cold War geopolitical order, the order of globalized militarization, keeping in mind two premises: these regions are not homogeneous at all (particularly from a structural point of view), and the relations between them have changed deeply since the 1990s. Therefore, an interregional perspective on the geopolitical order will be presented here. But, in order to understand this perspective, it is necessary to see the whole picture. That is why we will first deal with the implication of the new post-Cold War geopolitical order for Latin America and Europe. After it, the construction of examples of interregionalism and transregionalism will be analysed.

Europe and Latin America in the post-Cold War geopolitical order of globalized militarization The End of History was far from being reached in 1989 – as Francis F ­ ukuyama himself has been forced to accept. Instead, a New World Order emerged within the same socio-historical formation – which Wallerstein and others define as world capitalist economy – with new characteristics, but subject in general terms to the same socio-economic-political macro-structural framework: a single world market, a multiple inter-State system and multiple societies defined by the States. What are the new characteristics of this new world order? They are mostly related to the intensification of features which were already active in previous geopolitical orders, but there are highly important transformations. First and notably, world market globalization has increased, not just in terms of time-space compression (see Harvey, 1992) but also in terms of the homogenization of good and services that the market offers in different parts of the planet. Second, security has been militarized all over the world, that is, in the central countries the military forces are in charge of maintaining security in the face of an omnipresent enemy which presents itself as “aterritorial”, and is always hidden – George W. Bush and his successors’ permanent war against “Islamist” terrorism – while in periphery countries armies are responsible for police work against “drug trafficking” – as happens in M ­ exico and Brazil – or are actors in perennial ethnic wars like in Uganda and Congo. Third, disputes to guarantee control of natural resources increase in a context of climate change and its unpredictable consequences, and people initiate migration movements unprecedented in recent human history in response to this same problem. The fourth characteristic is perhaps the most significant and affects the macro-structural framework: “[c]ivil society is no longer confined to the

Euro-Latin American interregionalism  65 borders of the territorial state” (Kaldor, 2003: 1). Although the reinvention of “civil society” took place decades ago (in the 1970s and 1980s), in Latin America and Eastern Europe in particular, Kaldor highlights the importance of the turning point when “the social, political and economic transformations that were taking place in different parts of the world […] came to the surface after 1989” (2003: 1). Therefore, the new geopolitical order of “globalized militarization” implies very high levels of globalization – including the creation of a global civil society – and militarism. As Cynthia Enloe says, “[t]oday’s world is historically remarkable for its level of globalized militarism” (2016: 1). Furthermore, the clear decline of the United States in the economic area and its military incapacity to subdue all the existing powers (Russia and China in particular) has notably complicated the definition of hegemony in the world-system after the end of the Cold War. It is not possible to point out easily a hegemon, as it happened between 1946 and 1989. Without going deeply into this discussion – which I have addressed elsewhere (Cairo, 2008a:  455–456) – if we accept Agnew’s definition of hegemony as “the dominant understandings and rules governing political and economic practice of a given period as accepted by coalition of élites” (Agnew, 1998: 128), we can clearly find a dominant geopolitical discourse within a geopolitical order without the need for a hegemon. In this regard, there are three most distinctive characteristics of the hegemonic geopolitical discourse after the Cold War: (1) the world has globalized and it is highly interdependent; (2) free access to all world markets is a non-negotiable condition and (3) the democratization of the world is an “obligation” for the most developed countries. In the face of this, discourses that could be defined as “populist” have been gaining momentum in left- and right-wing versions, which add to the traditional positions supporting national independence and strict non-­ interference in other countries’ affairs, such as the case of the People’s Republic of China, and which challenge the hegemonic discourse: (1) the sovereignty of States has to be restored to improve the quality of life of citizens (of the people in the left-wing version); (2) the restoration of sovereignty guarantees security (right-wing populism) and (3) the restoration of sovereignty allows for the transformation of the political-economic system (left-wing populism). In short, in addition to a new discourse, a new set of inter-State relations is emerging in the new geopolitical order, thus leaving obsolete those of the precedent one. Latin America witnessed an unprecedented level of geopolitical autonomy in this post-Cold War order (Cairo, 2008b), which is related in the first place to a favourable international scenario: the decline of the United States as hegemonic power, which paradoxically heightened after the Cold War, and the focus of American foreign policy – and military effort – on the Middle East after 11 September 2001. But there are also endogenous factors: the region made remarkable autonomous efforts towards integration

66  Heriberto Cairo such as the Mercosur-Andean Community (CAN) confluence, the creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and then the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and even the emergence of “post-neoliberal blocks with deliberate counter-hegemonic strategies” (­Preciado Coronado, 2014) like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP). This situation fostered the emergence of autonomous political – and epistemic – projects in Latin A ­ merica which irrevocably integrated the Caribbean States into a regional structural unit which goes beyond the simply cultural, although old transatlantic cultural links still remain in new interregional expressions, as we will see. The end of the Cold War brought with it the expansion of the EU to the East, which in practice means that a political synecdoche has taken place and the EU is understood as Europe for virtually all purposes. The adaptation of the EU to the new geopolitical order has been more complicated, stuck between subordination to the decadent old hegemon – the wars in former Yugoslavia – and the attempts to carry out “constructive” and peaceful diplomacy, as seen in the advances in interregionalism and the construction of bi-regional “strategic alliances”, which we will analyse below.1 The Construction of a Relationship: The EU and Latin America and the Caribbean Summits and the “Bi-regional Strategic Partnership” The first Latin America and Caribbean – EU Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1999. Its main explicit objective was, to promote and develop our relations towards a strategic bi-regional partnership, based upon the profound cultural heritage that unites us, and on the wealth and diversity of our respective cultural expressions. These have endowed us with strong multi-faceted identities, as well as the will to create an international environment which allows us to raise the level of the well-being of our societies and meet the principle of sustainable development, seizing the opportunities offered by an increasingly globalised world, in a spirit of equality, respect, alliance and co-operation between our regions.2 Therefore, the idea of a “strategic bi-regional partnership” relies on three assumptions: (1) Latin America and Europe share a common cultural heritage; (2) globalization is good and offers opportunities to the integrated regions and (3) horizontal, equal international relations are the best option to compete in that globalized world. The first assumption was strengthened in the second Summit in Madrid two years later, “Our history and culture, together with the values and principles we share, are the basis of this privileged relationship”.3 This is obviously a partial view of history that erases the colonial exploitation of the past and celebrates the acculturation of the peoples of the New World. It is a Eurocentric point of view and not surprisingly it would be softened in later common declarations.

Euro-Latin American interregionalism  67 The second idea was also reinforced in Madrid: “We believe that furthering our integration processes and increasing trade and investment are important means of enhancing access to the benefits of globalisation”.4 ­Perhaps there is no better updating of the ideas of Immanuel Kant or Adam Smith than the so-called capitalist peace theory; trade would continue to be the best way to preserve peace in a globalized world. Finally, multilateralism has become the most solid foundation underlying the idea of strategic partnership. In this sense, the EU has definitely bet on soft power in its relations with organized regions and powers farther away than its immediate environment. This contrast the militaristic approach of the United States (Kagan, 2002). The summits were held every two years. The third was held in G ­ uadalajara in 2004, where the social cohesion was the protagonist. The fourth took place in Vienna in 2006. Its main result was the creation of one interregional institutional mechanism: The Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (EuroLat), whose constituent session took place in Brussels. E ­ uroLat is a multilateral Parliamentary Assembly composed of 150 members, ­seventy-five from the European Parliament and seventy-five from the Latin American component, including Parlatino (Latin American Parliament), Parlandino (Andean Parliament), Parlacen (Central American Parliament), Parlasur (Mercosur Parliament) and Mexican and Chilean Congresses. Lima was the seat of the fifth summit in 2008. The asymmetry between the regions, and the asymmetry inside the regions, particularly Latin A ­ merica was pointed out as one of the main problems to develop further the interregional approach. There were callings for a more individualized approach to the negotiation with countries or sub-regional groupings, issue that exploded in the next summit. The sixth took place in Madrid again, where there was a sort of inflection in the balance between interregionalism and bilateralism. The strategic character of the association between the two regions continued to be stated in its final declaration, “Towards a new stage in the bi-regional partnership: innovation and technology for sustainable development and social inclusion”, although it now added some nuance: “We hereby commit to further strengthening this partnership, with the goals of deepening political dialogue and regional integration, promoting social inclusion and cohesion as well as intensifying bilateral relations between individual countries from both regions”.5 The assertion of bilateralism in the Declaration responds to a perceived need by certain authors to overcome the stagnation of interregional relations, but as Sanahuja (2011) correctly points out, what happened at the Madrid Summit was rather a rebalancing between interregionalism and bilateralism, given that the critical analyses of the former are based on a series of mistaken assumptions, such as the political risk that it would involve, interregional relations could be the most suitable way for the EU to support those regional frameworks that, like UNASUR, aim at channelling

68  Heriberto Cairo the actors and factors of bilateral tension. This policy, in which Brazil has invested most efforts as South American leading country, is contributing positively to lessening and eliminating tensions and thus to favouring regional stability. (Sanahuja, 2011: 34) The Madrid’s Summit will be also remembered by the creation of the EU – Latin America and the Caribbean Foundation (EU-LAC Foundation) that formally began operating in November 2011, and whose aim is “to transform and adapt the strategic partnership between the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean into a strengthened and visible reality where the respective societies in both these regions can actively participate”.6 There is a change in the partner’s grouping when was created the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the last example of post-liberal regionalism to the west of the Atlantic. It is a political agreement mechanism which, aiming at including all thirty-three Latin American and Caribbean States, emerged inspired by Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela in February 2010. The CELAC aims at improving the search for consensus and the protection of regional matters of common interest in the international sphere, especially in the most relevant scenarios of international institutional architecture such as the OECD, the G-20 and the S ­ ecurity Council. This has in fact allowed for building regional dialogues with China ­(CELAC-China Forum) and with Russia (Permanent M ­ echanism for Political Dialogue and Cooperation between Russia and CELAC). However, the biggest success in this regard is that related to the bi-regional advances that have taken place in the CELAC-EU framework. These CELAC-EU summits have been held bi-annually since 2013, as ­follow-on to the ALCUE bi-regional dialogues. It is worth noting that relations seem to have re-adjusted over the last few years, especially due to the effects of the financial crisis on the EU’s institutional architecture, which contrasts with the increasing importance of Latin America which, particularly through the 2007–2013 period, has been spurred on by new leaderships and new ways of understanding regional integration. The first CELAC-EU Summit in Santiago de Chile in 2013 was a complete success, especially if we bear in mind the representation of sixty-one countries, thirty-four chiefs of State and heads of governments, and more than thirty international institutions and hundreds of civil society representatives, who met in parallel at the Business Summit, the Academic Summit and the Summit of the Peoples. The Santiago Summit slogan was an, “Alliance for Sustainable Development: Promoting Investments of Social and Environmental Quality”. The Declaration after the Summit tried to be careful in order to create meeting spaces between the two regions, “to avoid protectionism in all its forms”, and “to promote increased and diversified bi-regional investments of Social and Environmental Quality in line with sustainable development and with Corporate Social Responsibility,

Euro-Latin American interregionalism  69 providing stable conditions for the creation of new enterprises”. It also underlined the “commitment to achieve sustainable development in its three dimensions: economic, social and environmental, in an integrated and balanced way”, in such a way as to recognize that “the progress achieved in the implementation of our bi-regional Action Plan and welcome its deepening through the incorporation of new chapters on gender and investment” and “with the purpose of strengthening the bi-regional Strategic Partnership and recognising the duty of States to take all appropriate measures to ensure the common good of their societies, prioritising the most vulnerable groups”.7 The Santiago de Chile Summit emphasized the importance of searching for more transfer and exchange in the promotion of SMEs, flanking policies for human capital training, the simplification of administrative and payment procedures, and other needs such as generating more technology transfer, creating quality jobs and promoting responsible business practices. Some of the relevant issues dealt with at the Summit, already included in the 2010–2012 Action Plan and re-included in the 2013–2015 Plan, were those related to migrations and drugs. In relations to drugs, a salient point was the agreement to strengthen the bi-regional Coordination and Cooperation Mechanism on Drugs, while in terms of migration, CELAC-EU-structured dialogue on migrations continued to be pursued, and was oriented to improving joint action and expand public policies aiming both at integration and the fight against racism and the prevention of irregular practices mainly in relation to human trafficking and migrant smuggling. Finally, the design of the 2013–2015 Action Plan was completed and continues to be the instrument to identify the major lines of actions and priority strategies in the bi-regional scenario, and it explicitly aims at building a bi-regional space based on networks fostering interconnectivity, integration, cohesion and poverty eradication. All of the above was substantially embodied in the framework of the II  CELAC-EU Summit held in 2015 in Belgium under the title, “Shaping our common future: working together for prosperous, cohesive and sustainable societies for our citizens”. The most significant feature of this Summit was the continuity given to the major lines of work from Santiago 2013 and to the 2015–2017Action Plan. Furthermore, the need to start negotiations on an agreement for political dialogue and cooperation with Cuba was highlighted, as well to continue to make efforts to reach a balanced, global and ambitious MERCOSUR-EU association agreement at the earliest opportunity, which today amounts to a partial interregional dialogue, a question we will look at below.

Transregional dialogues and institutions: the case of the Ibero-American Summits8 Apart from the summits of the two complete regions, where the dominant interregional geopolitical discourse is elaborated, partial meetings take place

70  Heriberto Cairo as well: EU with one Latin American country (EU-Brazil or EU-­Mexico) – cases of hybrid interregionalism according to the classification of G ­ ardini and Malamud (see the Introduction of this book) – or sub-region (EU-­ Central America or EU-MERCOSUR) – pure regionalism. However, the case of the Ibero-American Summits, with the two European Iberian countries and all seventeen Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin ­A merican countries, it is more a case of transregionalism than interregionalism. Its nature is peculiar, as far as the more interested state and promoter of the idea is Spain that has been using its role as key partner in the Ibero-American Community in order to reinforce its capacities in the Euro-Latin American and Caribbean bi-regional strategic alliance. This will illustrate the interests that may lie behind these partial interregional geopolitical dialogues. The Ibero-American Community of Nations dates from the 1980s, which makes it a relatively recent creation. Nevertheless, it did not appear out of nowhere. Two of the usual elements in processes of identity building – a common past and language – lay at the foundation of its construction by the elites who proposed it. In this respect, it was not a new innovation; others had preceded it, the main one in the 1940s. In the early days of General Franco’s dictatorship, when his brotherin-law, Serrano Suñer, was Foreign Minister, a more orthodox Falangist programme was adopted. Together with a European policy that favoured involvement in the Second World War on the side of the Axis powers, Serrano Suñer tried to put into practice the principle of Hispanidad (Spanishness): in other words, the “spiritual imperialism” of Hispanic America (Pardo Sanz, 1995). The Consejo de la Hispanidad (Council of the Hispanic World) was created in 1940 (Barbeito Díez, 1989) with the objective of overseeing and promoting “all activities aimed at unifying the culture, economic interests and power of the Hispanic world”.9 In the rhetoric of the regime, Spain, although physically part of Europe, was spiritually American. The course of the war led to Serrano Suñer leaving the government in 1943, and after that, the Council began to lose influence until it disappeared altogether in 1945 when the Foreign Ministry underwent reorganization. An act was passed assigning the aim of “maintaining spiritual links between all the people making up the cultural community of the Hispanic world” to a new o ­ rganization: the Institute of Hispanic Culture (Instituto de Cultura H ­ ispánica) (quoted in Barbeito Díez, 1989: 134). Following the end of the Second World War, a new policy was devised in response to the regime’s isolation, in which the countries of Hispanic America provided almost the only “window” on to the outside. In addition to the Institute, more organizations and institutions were patiently created until, in 1953, just as isolation was abating thanks to agreements with the United States, the Foreign Minister at the time, Martín Artajo, proposed the creation of a Hispanic Community of Nations (Comunidad Hispánica de Naciones). In his speech on 12 October, the so-called Día de la Raza (Day of the Race [of the people] or Columbus Day in the English-speaking world),

Euro-Latin American interregionalism  71 he spoke of the need for a better structuring of the Hispanic Community of Nations that should be conceived as a “spiritual community” between Spain and “the peoples of its common stock”, reinforced by miscegenation (an aspect that distinguished Spanish colonialism from its French and British counterparts, according to Artajo). This would give rise to an “indissoluble brotherhood”. In 1958, Martín Artajo wrote, We have gone beyond the stage of pure rhetoric and are entering a period of strong relations. The agencies of the Hispanic Community of N ­ ations are the Ibero-American Office of Education (Oficina de Educación Iberoamericana), the Ibero-American Social Security Organization (Organización Iberoamericana de la Seguridad Social), the Intellectual Cooperation Congresses (Congresos de Cooperación Intelectual) […] the Hispanic Culture Institutes (Institutos de Cultura Hispánica) and others. (quoted in Morales Lezcano, 1991: 149) The countries of Ibero-America continued to be of great importance for the dictatorship in the 1950s, although they were no longer its only foreign contact. As Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla points out, the project of a Hispanic Community of Nations constituted a way for the dictatorship to operate with the objective of “achieving greater autonomy in its own relations with the United States” (1988: 227). Nowadays, it is relatively common to hear of Spain described as a medium power state.10 The idea is supported by its demographic, economic and political-diplomatic dimension and its geopolitical situation after it joined the EU in 1986. To a certain extent, therefore, Spain has the capacity for influencing the international system and is able to pursue a relatively autonomous active foreign policy with respect to hegemonic and other major powers. The geopolitical codes (see Taylor and Flint, 2000) of the ­Spanish state are based on its relative importance and geopolitical situation, as well as its history and the present world order, and focus essentially on four regions of the world: Europe, the Mediterranean basin, the United States and Latin America. The United States, which has been a hegemonic power since the Second World War, is an obligatory reference point for any country in the world-system. Europe, and in particular the EU, has been the main priority for Spanish foreign policy ever since the 1960s, although it was obviously one of the two most important arenas for action in the past. The Mediterranean basin and in particular the Maghreb have always been areas of concern for Spanish governments. Finally, Latin America is the other region of the world in which Spain has historically had greatest interest and, taking into account Spain’s isolation with respect to Europe after the Civil War, relations with this region have perhaps been the most continuous and therefore the most relevant throughout the twentieth century. It is therefore necessary to place the process of construction of the ­Hispanic Community of Nations within the more traditional framework of

72  Heriberto Cairo Latin Americanist action in Spain. The election of a socialist President of the Government in 1982 was a key factor in this process. As Arenal points out, “Ibero-America was also one of the key dimensions and foreign policy priorities in the foreign policy project of the socialist government, together with Europe and Spain’s membership of the then European Community, which was the overriding priority” (1994: 127). The celebration of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America in 1992 was a magnificent opportunity to mark out a new foreign policy. The main objective was to strengthen the role of Spain in the international system and at the same time disseminate and promote its image as a modern state. At the first Ibero-American Conference of National Commissions for the 500th anniversary held in 1983, eleven countries with national commissions at that time were represented. When the third Conference took place in 1985, all Ibero-American countries were represented, which led to the creation of a meeting point and an instrument of multilateral cooperation between governments in the geocultural field. The Conferences led to a Summit of Heads of State and Governments that was to be held in Guadalajara (­Mexico) during the 500th anniversary year. The choice of venue was not arbitrary. Mexico had been negotiating its integration in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since 1990 and playing host to the summit was an opportunity for it to “show national and international public opinion that integration into North America did not mean abandoning the country’s political and cultural links with its indigenous circumstances and with Latin America” (Celso Lefer, quoted in Preciado Coronado and Rosales Saldaña, 1997: 57). In this way, both the Mexican and Spanish governments were able to make the most of the Summit and reinforce their autonomy in the international system. Since then, a Summit has been held annually, although we are not going to deal with them here. It should be pointed out, however, that starting with a meeting forum and moving on through multilateral state cooperation, a new regional political space was defined at the international level. This process culminated in the thirteenth Summit held in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) in 2003 when it was decided to create the General Ibero-American Secretariat (SEGIB) as a new international organization. The SEGIB, which has its headquarters in Madrid, is the permanent institutional and technical support agency for the Ibero-American Conference and the Summit of Heads of State and Governments made up of twenty-two Ibero-­A merican countries, nineteen of them in Latin America and three in the Iberian ­Peninsula (Spain, Portugal and Andorra). Once the Summits began to be held, it was clear to Spanish diplomacy that this consultation forum had gone beyond the limits of cultural matters, “The definition of Ibero-America is not a synonym for Latin A ­ merica, which is merely a cultural definition, but a legal-political definition in terms of international relations” (Morán, 1993: 18). However, the impulse that was given to the Summits by Spain was not intended to establish a scenario

Euro-Latin American interregionalism  73 of competition with the then European Community but rather to foster synergies, It is not about complementing but rather about promoting specific agencies and companies engaged in regional cooperation. Neither in the cases of EC members Spain and Portugal nor in those of the Americans is the intention to qualify the participation of specific institutions of integration; it is rather to reinforce them and define identities. (Morán, 1993: 23) Two basic narratives developed around the Ibero-American Community of Nations. In research carried out by the Centro Español de Estudios sobre América Latina (Spanish Centre for Latin American Studies, or CEDEAL), to which Celestino del Arenal was a major contributor, the existence of the Ibero-American Community of Nations was presented as the fruit of a new democratic model of relations between Spain and Latin America, while at the Seminars on the Hispanic World, held at the Centro Superior de Estudios de la Defensa Nacional (Centre of Higher Studies for National Defence, or CESEDEN) and coordinated by Manuel Lizcano, more emphasis was put on the community of civilization and the idea of a common Ibero-American “homeland”. But the narrative of Professor Arenal became in some way the official one and was enacted by a Senate Report in 1998. Summing up the ­argument – and any summary is an interpretation – the idea and reality of the Ibero-­A merican Community of Nations rested on a series of common socio-­h istorical bases constituted mainly by history, language and culture. These had woven a mesh of interests, bonds and relations that made it possible to talk of the existence of a “spontaneous community”. In fact, this lacked any sort of articulation or institutionalization until the arrival of democracy in Spain, which is when the project that brought the Community into being began to take shape. On this original basis, the idea of the ­Ibero-­A merican Community of Nations broke with that of Hispanity associated with Francoism, not only with respect to terminology but also to philosophy, assumptions and objectives, and took on the shape of a “democratic model” of relations with Latin America, as opposed to the previous “traditional/­conservative” model. The democratic model was defined by relations based on equality, mutual respect and independence, which was very different from the position of pre-eminence that asserted itself in the idea of Hispanity. The new objectives were to develop policies based on agreement and cooperation; no longer were they aimed at reinforcing the regime both internally and internationally. The theory of a “spontaneous community” of peoples, however, is difficult to test empirically. Moreover, considering how it has taken shape it is doubtful that the project of the Ibero-American Community of Nations, which led to the SEGIB, pre-dates socialist governments. It responds to the

74  Heriberto Cairo interests of Iberian and Latin American states in achieving a certain autonomy in the international system in the face of the stronger states of the EU and the United States.

Conclusions The Euro-Latin American interregionalism is perhaps one of the best examples of the consequences of the new geopolitical order in the world. The foreign (geo)policy of the EU explored soft power as a means to struggle for primacy in the world geopolitical order. In an order marked by the ­m ilitarization imposed by the old hegemon, which cannot be rivalled by the EU, an attempt has been made to establish multilateralism and interregional alliances as the best way to deal with the main challenges of globalization. More regional integration, better and increased interregional trade and ­investment are the particular adjustments to the hegemonic discourse of free access to all the markets by the EU. In the case of the Iberian-American Community of Nations, I have attempted to show the process of construction of a political transregional space, and its representation. Now it is evident that, even if not planned, it is anything but natural. First, there was a celebration to prepare which could magnify the Spanish role in the world arena: the 500th Anniversary of the Discovery of America. Then, there was a series of Summits of Chiefs of State and Heads of Government. Finally, we found the “embryo” of an organization: the CIN. It is difficult to think that the end result was planned from the beginning, and it is still more difficult to prove the “natural” path from a “spontaneous community” to an international organization. In any case, the process is not new to the Spanish foreign policy of the last century. Both cases are linked implicitly, although not explicitly. There is general agreement on the fact that the inclusion of Spain and Portugal – but mainly Spain – was a definitive impulse of the EU-ALC relation: ALC was a sort of dowry for Spain in its relation with the EU, and the EU was able to develop an interregion as part of a global policy. However, some of the critics of the role of Spain in this relation point out that the “dominant role” of Spain in relation to Latin America causes mistrust in some Latin American countries, particularly some of the biggest, like Argentina or Brazil (Maihold, 2007:  292).

Notes 1 However, it is worth noting that in the face of this latter tendency, a discourse has been emerging, mainly from the ultraconservative right, which despises a “Venusian” EU, permissive towards crime and terrorism, vis à vis a “Martian” USA, which would have to be responsible for the security of the whole planet. 2 Latin America/Caribbean/European Union: First Summit/Declaration of Rio de Janeiro [On line: 29 June 1999. Available at: www.europarl.europa.eu/delegations/ noneurope/idel/d12/docs/cumbrederio/declaracionfinalen.htm. Accessed on: 2 May 2018].

Euro-Latin American interregionalism  75 3 European Union – Latin America and Caribbean Summit, Political Declaration, Madrid, 17 May 2002 [Available at: http://ue.eu.int/Newsroom. Accessed on: 4 May 2018]. 4 Ibidem. 5 VI European Union-Latin America and Caribbean Summit, Madrid Declaration, Madrid, 18 May, 2010 [Available at: https://eulacfoundation.org/en/system/ files/VI%20European%20Union-Latin%20America%20and%20Caribbean%20 Summit%2C%20Madrid%20Declaration%2C%20Madrid%2C%2018%20 May%202010.pdf. Accessed on: 13 February, 2018]. 6 EU-LAC web page [Available at: https://eulacfoundation.org/en/about-us. Accessed on: 21 January 2018]. 7 The information in relation to the Santiago Summit can be found is available at: http://www.celac2015.go.cr/category/cumbre/documentos/page/3/. Accessed on: 23 February 2016]. 8 The basic argumentation of this section is contained in Cairo and Bringel (2010). 9 Article 2 of the Act that created the Consejo de la Hispanidad (published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado [official state gazette], 7 September 1940). 10 For example, in the words of Fernando Morán, the first Foreign Minister in the socialist governments of the 1980s, “Spain is a medium power in the international system, although in the regional arena it could be considered a power of some importance” (Morán, 1984: 8). See Morales Lezcano (1991).

References Agnew, John (1998) Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Arenal, Celestino del (1994) Política exterior de España hacia Iberoamérica. Madrid: Editorial Complutense. Barbeito Díez, Mercedes (1989) “El Consejo de la Hispanidad.” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, no. 2, 113–137. Cairo, Heriberto (2008a) “Hegemonía.” In J. C. Pereira (ed.) Diccionario de relaciones internacionales y política exterior. Barcelona: Ariel, 455–456. Cairo, Heriberto (2008b) “A América Latina nos modelos geopolíticos modernos: da marginalização à preocupação com sua autonomía.” Caderno CRH (Salvador da Bahia, Brasil), vol. 21, no. 53, 221–237. Cairo, Heriberto, and Bringel, Breno M. (2010) “Articulaciones del Sur Global: afinidad cultural, internacionalismo solidario e Iberoamérica en la globalización contrahegemónica.” Geopolítica(s). Revista de estudios sobre espacio y poder, vol. 1, no. 1, 41–63. Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, Lorenzo (1988) Diplomacia franquista y política cultural hacia Iberoamérica, 1939–1953. Madrid: CSIC. Enloe, Cynthia (2016) Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gardini, Gian Luca, and Malamud, Andrés (2018) “Interregionalism and the ­A mericas: A Conceptual Framework.” In G. L. Gardini, S. Koschut and A. Falke (eds.) Interregionalism and the Americas. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1–18. Harvey, David (1992) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Hettne, Björn, and Söderbaum, Fredrik (2005) “Civilian Power or Soft Imperialism? The EU as a Global Actor and the Role of Interregionalism.” European Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 10, no. 4, 535–552.

76  Heriberto Cairo Kagan, Robert (2002) “Power and Weakness.” Policy Review, no. 113, 3–28 [On line. Available at: www.hoover.org/research/power-and-weakness. Accessed on: 10 January 2018]. Kaldor, Mary (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity Press. Maihold, Günther (2007) “Más allá del interregionalismo: el future de las relaciones entre Europa y América Latina.” Foro Internacional, vol. XLVII, no. 188, 269–299. Morales Lezcano, Víctor (1991) España, de pequeña potencia a potencia media. ­Madrid: UNED. Morán, Fernando (1984) “Principios de la política exterior española.” Leviatán, no. 16, 7–19. Morán, Fernando (1993) “Prólogo.” In Segunda Cumbre Iberoamericana, M ­ adrid, ­España, Julio 1992. Discursos y Documentos. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Pardo Sanz, Rosa (1995) ¡Con Franco hacia el Imperio!: La política exterior española en América Latina, 1939–1945. Madrid: UNED. Preciado Coronado, Jaime Antonio (2014) “La nueva gramática democrática frente a la integración autónoma latinoamericana y caribeña.” Sociedade e Estado, vol.  29, no. 1, 45–72 [On line. doi: 10.1590/S0102-69922014000100004. Accessed on: 5 November 2017]. Preciado Coronado, Jaime, and Rosales Saldaña, Jorge Abel (1997) “De ­Guadalajara a Miami: La contribución de las Cumbres Iberoamericanas y de las Américas al proceso de integración continental.” In J. Preciado Coronado and A. Rocha Valencia (eds.) América Latina: Realidad, virtualidad y utopía de la integración. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 49–78. Sanahuja, José A. (2011) “Las relaciones entre la UE y América Latina y el Caribe tras la Cumbre de Madrid: el fin de un ciclo político y la necesidad de una nueva estrategia.” In C. Malamud, F. Steinberg y C. Tejedor (eds.) Anuario Iberoamericano 2011. Madrid: Agencia EFE/ Real Instituto Elcano, 23–44. [On line. Available at: www.anuarioiberoamericano.es/pdf/analisis/4_jose_antonio_sanahuja. pdf. Accessed on: 16 October 2011]. Sánchez Bajo, Claudia (1999) “The European Union and Mercosur: A Case of ­Inter-regionalism.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 5, 927–941. Taylor, Peter J., and Flint, Colin (2000) Political Geography: World-economy, ­Nation-state and Locality. 3rd ed. London: Longman.

Part II

Geopolitical imaginaries and socio-territorial orders in Latin America and Europe

4 European models, Latin American cases Eurocentrism and the contentious politics of state formation Pedro dos Santos de Borba Introduction This chapter intends to discuss the historical sociology of modern states in Latin America, moving away from certain developmentalist assumptions and Eurocentric biases. As Wallerstein (2000), Knöbl (2003) and ­Bhambra (2007) among others have shown, the apparent dismissal of Cold War modernization theories did not necessarily meant an uprooting of the foundations on which they lied. To face this challenge, I bring interregional concerns to the forefront. Although nowadays interregionalism seems hard to detach from European Union’s diplomatic discourse, it is forceful to argue that the most durable, profound and consequential interregional process in history was modern colonialism. Even so, until recently the interconnected character of modern colonialism was generally missing in the analysis of state formation, as if Western Europe and Latin America were examples of two contrasting but independent trajectories. On the one hand, E ­ uropean interstate system was the stage for the emergence of political modernity as worldwide process, in whose explanation overseas empire-building was secondary or exogenous. On the other hand, Latin American countries, as post-colonial ones in general, were examples of a different and particular path, in which the arrival of political modernity implied a shock with a given colonial background. To pave new ways in this research agenda, as we shall see, I suggest to further bridge the three existing gaps: between social theory and so-called area studies, between historical sociology and “global” historiography, and between the predominantly Anglophone post-colonial literature and Latin American critical tradition. Due to the limitations of the chapter, I cannot but offer exploratory indications on the grounds these dialogues could develop. As we keep on building up a continent out of this archipelago, it might reveal ways to overcome a kind of “not-yet complex” in Latin American political sociology, as well as enduring Eurocentric blind spots in conventional wisdom about the making of modern states. Finally, the reappraisal of post-colonial state formation presents a key path of development for the critical geopolitics of modern world-system.

80  Pedro dos Santos de Borba The chapter is divided into four sections including this introduction. The following one deals briefly with two leading interpretations of political modernity in Latin America, namely Centeno’s “blood and debt” hypothesis and François-Xavier Guerra’s argument on a cultural mutation associated with Spanish American independencies (Centeno, 2002; Guerra,  2000). ­Despite their different backgrounds and perspectives, both acquired a considerable influence among later research on Latin American historical sociology and political history. My departure point is that, keeping aside intrinsic merits, they reproduce specific Eurocentric modernizing biases that demand reassessment. The point is not only that modernizing schemes offer a poor understanding of post-colonial or peripheral societies as such but also that they lie upon and reinforce mischaracterizations about its presumed standards of social change, whether a disconnected early modern Europe, whether reified notions on “modernity”, “citizenship” or “nation”. The central argument of the chapter is laid down in the third and fourth sections. Its general concern is to invert the reasoning: instead of pointing out the existing gaps between Latin American post-colonial states and the theoretical expectations generated by its European counterparts, I investigate what challenges and reconstructions are needed in our theoretical expectations in order to frame state formation as a systemic process, encompassing both European and Latin American experiences. This initial proposition is, then, developed into two lines of thought. In the third section, I intend to challenge not only “methodological nationalism” but also conventional systemic approaches that understate colonialism as building block of modern politics. A key step here shall be to substitute the picture of a world-spreading model of sovereign nation-state, diffused elsewhere by early modern Europe, to highlight the concrete practices of splitting spaces of sovereignty among nations from imperial sovereignty over peoples. In other words, the dismissal of so-called Eurocentric diffusionism (Blaut, 1993) should bring us to perceive the multicentric formation of modern world-­ system, dealing with the theoretical consequences of its contradictions and differences. In a sense, this revaluation follows Gurminder Bhambra’s critique of ideal-type methodology applied to compare development (Bhambra, 2014: 1–17). The same appraisal is used, in the fourth section, to the contentious politics of state formation. As we shall observe, the literature in this regard incurs frequently on type modelling, whether for the means (total interstate war-making) and whether for the ends (egalitarian individual citizenship on national ground) of political modernity. For these types, peripheral experience plays no creative or conceptual role, since theory-building mingles with European history. My point in this final section shall be that a reassessment of contentious politics research agenda might offer insights to place both war-making and republican utopias in a broader and more indeterminate conflict around political authority. As this conflict does not have established final form, our focus remains on its immanent, contradictory

European models, Latin American cases  81 and unstable forms. To decipher them, peripheral perspectives may be theoretically valuable to unveil the exclusionary content implicit to political membership, no longer as a deviant or transitional situation of a truly universal membership, but as general features embedded in political modernity, more or less visible depending on our observation site. Therefore, I suggest to replace the ubiquitous teleology of political inclusion by an analysis of selective strategies of political boundering – a point already explored within different streams of critical political theory.

Political developmentalism and enlightened elites: moving beyond the modernizing bias Although its origins are hard to define, the sociological literature on Latin American states clearly witnessed an upswing in the last decades. A central ­figure in it was Cuban-American sociologist Miguel Ángel Centeno (1997, 2002). His influential argument departs from the causal link between war-­related activities and state-building, theoretically established for European ­experience from Max Weber (1978) to Charles Tilly (1990). Contrasting it with the Latin American military experience in the nineteenth century, Centeno argues that irregular, civil and partial warfare, although violent, were unable to solidify strong bonds of national identity, effective bureaucratic administration and a proper recognition of rights and citizenship. Around this core, further developments have extended or adjusted the mechanism in order to quantify it (Thies, 2005), make it more subtle (Kurtenbach, 2011) or expand it to explain regime variation and liberal democracy in the region (López-Alves, 2000). In the logic of Centeno’s argument, the initial portrait of Latin American reality as a kaleidoscopic sequence of poverty, corruption, violence, clientelism and racism has a decisive role: it places Latin America in the bottom of the ladder of state development. It also allows him to link this diagnosis with the difference on war-making record compared to Western Europe. His central concern is to endorse the counterintuitive logic of war as a sort of creative destruction: the responsive, civic and public-oriented state institutions were moulded by the desperate and chaotic efforts to win wars. As he moves the discussion to Latin American context, he asserts that warstates mechanism did not work for a number of reasons, resulting in little more than “blood and debt”. Stuck in kind of a negative circular causality, the analysis somehow denies the process it was intended to explain. Along the analysis, it becomes clear that many attributes are implicitly attached to his working definition of modern state: a clear and stable territory, a common collection of national symbols, effective institutions to distribute impartial justice, a national-scale bureaucracy conducted by rational standards and so on. A truly modern state embodies all these predicates, or, saying it on reverse: if a state authority does not treat all citizens the same way, if it does not have undisputed spatial boundaries, if there is corruption, patronage or prebendalism, if there is an armed opposition or if the state uses

82  Pedro dos Santos de Borba violence by unlawful patterns, one must conclude that it is not a truly modern state, or that it has not achieved this condition yet. In contrast, the assemble of this predicates was achieved in Western Europe and the United States through total warfare mobilization, resulting in high levels of state capacity. Behind Eurocentrism, there is a strongly apologetic conception of what a modern state is or ought to be. Its emergence corresponds implicitly to the realization of the emancipatory ideals of modernity while the absence of such ideals is translated as a deviance or incompletion of a typical modern state. Hence, state-building acquires an oddly civilizational sense: its progression blossoms into universal rights, civic freedoms, national solidarity, public services and democratic governance. This political development could be, at least in principle, measured by the state capacity variable, a continuum of strength that roughly goes from success to failure. As it uplifts state authority to a normative ideal beyond actual social conflicts, this implicit state theory remarkably fits Atilio Borón’s description of a reborn “statolatry” in new historical institutionalism (Borón, 2003: Chapter 8). Instead of focusing on war, taxes and administration, historian François-­ Xavier Guerra prefers to highlight the radically new cultural environment unravelled by the ideas of equal citizenship, free public sphere and a unified sovereign nation. Inspired by the revisionist historiography on the French Revolution, he identified a new language for political discourse in the cycle of Atlantic revolutions that encompasses Spanish American wars of independence. The fundamental issue of political modernity, hence, is the substitution of the Ancien Regime’s doctrines of legitimacy – referred to pactist, aggregate and historical principles of rule – towards the abstract, egalitarian and rational constitutional practice rooted in popular sovereignty. His work recurs essentially to speeches and press debates in order to trace this great shift back in time: unlike Centeno, a Weberian comparative macrosociologist, Guerra analyses intellectual change with special attention to context, circulation and meaning of political vernacular. Reaching Hispano-America in the critical juncture of 1808–1810, political modernity is then a sophisticated intellectual movement that was restricted to the enlightened elites who organized an emergent public sphere of newspapers, saloons and political magazines. Without access to the renewed constitutional controversies, and nurturing traditional values instead, common people lie in its antipode: at best, they can be object of the “political pedagogy” through civic education. In a circumstance of violent popular uprisings, engaging slaves and native Indians in the continent, his interpretation of political change leaves no room for their agency. In the grandiloquent narrative of modernity as a new cultural era, society is torn apart between those who have internalized its values, becoming true citizens and those who do not. By articulating new sociabilities, cultural elites prefigure the future society based on modern understandings of equality, liberty and rule by reason. When faced with disturbing behaviours, such as electoral corruption, fraud and the extralegal toppling of governments, Guerra has two answers

European models, Latin American cases  83 at hand: the first and more obvious reports to the incompatibility between modern institutions and the archaic practices embedded in ordinary people, which are not fully equipped to act as independent and self-interested citizens. Fraud or corruption would be then expressions of corporative, pactist and collective-based sociabilities that survive under the constitutional polity idealized by liberal elites. Even more revealing, the second answer is to underscore the “still partially traditional character of the elites themselves” (Guerra, 2000: 361), prone to factionalism, familism and clientelism. Once more, modernity as such is beyond the actual practices of political actors: it is a coherent body of abstract principles, which can be used as standard to evaluate actual practices and distinguish the modern from the old, the progressive from the obsolete. The cultural mutation spills from revolutionary France to later revolutions, and from the revolutionary intellectual class to common people. As this diffusion is never complete, one is faced with what political scientist Gabriel Almond (1960), a key modernization thinker, once called “cultural dualism” between modern and traditional institutions. Bringing it into a broader picture, my point is that both interpretations are different examples what could be called a resilient modernizing bias in the study of Latin American political history, introducing certain assumptions and expectations of developmentalist theories of the 1950s and 1960s. First, there is a normative understanding of “modernity” that strongly misrepresent even the allegedly modern European experiences.1 For instance, how could one fit German romanticism or internationalist socialism in Guerra’s picture of modernity, not to mention racism, patriarchy and imperialism? Or how close Centeno’s national state model ever was to British Empire historical record of administrative segregation, colonial repression and predatory fiscal drain in India, Ireland or South Africa? Is this Europe of national states a reasonable description for present-day Monaco, Spain, Andorra or Estonia, or does it happen to be a fuzzier picture? The point is simple: by misrepresenting Europe as an idealized modernity benchmark, the analyst is obliged to portray the non-European world in a diffusionist frame, since it is always half way from expected modernity. This commentary intends to highlight certain limits of these interpretations, which does not mean that they are useless or empirically false. For instance, the attention given by Guerra to contingency and the Atlantic connections of Spanish American revolutionary ideologies was crucially developed by Wolfgang Knöbl (2011) and Jeremy Adelman (2006). With his sophisticated historiographic prose, Guerra perhaps is describing rather the critical departure of what Pablo González Casanova (2006) has called “internal colonialism” as specific form of domination by local elites. Meanwhile, by comparing two different continental experiences, Centeno might be rather dealing with the economic and political asymmetries of an unequal world-system. The urgency to re-discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the problem (its character, its scale, its causation) is somehow a way of reposition the available research in renewed and critical grounds.

84  Pedro dos Santos de Borba

The interstate system from its margins: imperial spaces, sovereignty and colonialism In our reconstructive line of thought, the first move is to displace the assumption of an endogenous national-scale causation, that is, that “national societies” are unit-like independent containers of their own processes of state formation. Both historical sociologists and IR scholars have repeatedly stressed that states interact in a competitive system. The key concept for this system is sovereignty as a principle of territorial exclusivity and selfrule that sustain an abstract equality between every part of the system. Such system, often called Westphalian,2 expanded worldwide as sovereign polities were formed in non-Western World. This well-known scheme interestingly overshadows colonialism because it lies in an intriguing blind spot: a continued denial of sovereignty by a state which claims to be a sovereign part of the system. In Weberian sociology, the systemic character of state formation is mostly converted into an ­European continental scale of war-making and diplomacy, keeping outside its scope the imperial extroversion by these states. The issue here is not that colonial rule, while absent in early modern Europe, was present and effective to Latin American longue durée analysis. Rather, colonialism was a central feature of the general conditions for high-level mobilization of coercion and capital in a competitive system that, from its very inception, encompassed Latin America and Europe through Atlantic connections. In a path-breaking study of fiscal history, Carlos Marichal (2007) has underscored the place of Mexican economy in the rising interstate competition in the end of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Silver flowing from Mexico’s mints allowed Bourbon monarchy to sustain a complex network of strongholds, militia, ships and administrative personnel in the A ­ mericas, especially after the invasion of Cuba by the British in 1763. Moreover, the intensification of imperial competition induced a fiscal squeeze over ­Mexican society, including a number of voluntary and compulsory mechanisms that drained approximately 250 million silver pesos from 1760 to 1810. As the author points out, “this was the effective fiscal cost of being a colony” (Marichal, 2007: 257). As power relations and alignments shifted, all the competing Atlantic powers benefited from this fiscal surplus through smuggling, commerce, piracy and credit. During the critical years following the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1807, the silver supplies coming through Cádiz were fundamental for the resistance of the provisional Juntas in metropolitan cities. Arguably, the well-studied birth of Spanish liberalism in the constitutional assembly in Cádiz has, in its backstage, constitutive links with colonial exploitation overseas (Marichal, 2007: Chapter 7). To discuss scales of state formation, this kind of historiographical insight has clear implications. One cannot frame historical possibilities of Spanish polity, or indirectly all contemporary great powers, without regarding that the mobilization of coercion and capital, to use Tilly’s classical phrasing,

European models, Latin American cases  85 goes on beyond its metropolitan scale. Broadly, the formation of modern interstate system supersedes European scale because it was pumped by opportunities, profits and disputes occurring in overseas imperial spaces. From sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the states leading the European military competition were the very same that had championed overseas expansion and colonial coerced labour, a connection that was quite explicit for contemporaries (Deyon, 1969: Chapter 2). With a meaningful alliteration, we could say that exclusively endogenous mechanisms for social change observable in Western Europe became Eurocentric as long as, so to speak, Europe itself was no longer strictly European. Consequently, a basic step for Latin American historical sociology should be to reconcile with different historical approaches that in the last half century had tried to move beyond national-scale narratives and decentre Eurocentric diffusionism. Such methodological move does not imply the recurring common sense that states are losing relevance to transnational fluxes, nor that a world-system approach necessarily ends up lumping together all explanations into the single underlying logic of the capitalist interstate system, as sceptics promptly pointed out (Skocpol, 1977; Stern, 1988). The point is rather to substitute the serial unit-like modern state formations (and its subtler varieties3) for an integrated and long-term analysis of a modern world-system, its regional clusters and its asymmetric character. It  allows disentangling “Europe” and “Latin America” as separated and cohesive blocks, replacing them for relational situations. Perceiving connections in world-system scale and its layers is certainly not a solution per se, actually not even an original move, but it becomes an unavoidable initial step in the current state of the debate. As an example, let us take the major changes in state apparatus triggered by 1929 crash in Latin America (Drinot and Knight, 2014). Arguably, the collapse of export-oriented economic growth produced one of the most crucial junctures for state formation in the region, fostering a consistent trend in the expansion of state activities, differentiation of bureaucratic branches, fiscal re-organization and creative reinvention of national imaginaries. Compared to the frantic years following 1929, the rhythm of institutional change in nineteenth century may seem pale and sluggish (Whitehead, 2008). The world crisis prompts an acceleration of contentious politics and historical uncertainty, which moulds different outcomes in each empirical circumstance. Nevertheless, the decay of Latin American laissez-faire can hardly be disconnected from systemic processes that are remaking international political economy in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, the dispute around state regulation is embedded in a broader picture that encompasses the Soviet turn into state-planned industrialization, the Rooseveltian New Deal in United States, the fascist nationalism and anti-imperialist movements worldwide. In sum, at the systemic level, there is a change going on over the very meaning of state-building, affected by competition, uncertainty and emulation but also by asymmetric positions for individual states in that context.

86  Pedro dos Santos de Borba Our second move is to replace Eurocentric diffusionism for the acknowledgement of the “multi-centric nature of change in global history” (Bayly, 2004: 451). This move implies two major consequences: first, political modernity is not perceived as an invention of exceptionalist Western Europe that spread gradually to the rest of the world, but an open-ended and immanent intertwining of processes, conflating “social creativity” into contradictory and unequal outcomes (see Domingues, 2008). Not by its incompleteness but by its own character, “modern” if we want, this world-system happens to connect universalistic citizenship and capitalist slavery, sovereignty and colonialism, nation and empire, rule of law and personalist dictatorship, individualism and patriarchy, or even, as Gunder Frank (1969) had famously argued, the “development of underdevelopment”. Accordingly, a second consequence should be that idealized Eurocentric notions of modernity, nation or state, although eventually useful if properly contextualized by historians, cannot be converted in methodological yardsticks to evaluate non-European experiences, nor to vary local “modernities” in reference to a presumed Western backbone. To assume the multicentric dynamic of, say, citizenship in modern history comes along with the open sociological challenge of articulate its world-scale empirical contradictions in theoretical terms, instead of over-theorizing a disconnected European history (Bhambra, 2015). For this matter, the provocative essay of Louis Sala-Molins (2006) about the French Enlightenment and Code Noir of 1686 is lapidary. Reviewing the work of key thinkers such as Condorcet, Diderot and Abbé Raynal, Sala-Molins shows their incapacity to imagine contemporary black slaves of the empire within the universalistic framework of individual rights and liberties they were boldly putting forth. On contrary, a number of strategies are employed to segregate the world of the colonists and that of their slaves, often reduced to inhuman characteristics. Retrospectively, a celebratory evaluation of the Enlightenment and the Universal Declaration of 1789 misses its ambiguous complicity with the Code Noir that legally established modern slavery in the French colonies. A multicentric approach to modern citizenship must encompass its contradictory and racial assumptions, that is, the evolving connections between modern citizenship and modern ­slavery. So, “to interpret the Enlightenment without [the Negro slaves] is to play the game of the Enlightenment”, argues Sala-Molins (2006: 8): “It  is ­tantamount to limiting universal philanthropy to one’s little neighbourhood, reason to the domain of ‘Bible-whitism’, sovereignty to the boundaries of the parish, and the accomplished individual to the achievements of our local landowner”. This is not an argument about the past. If nowadays one blames immigration for raising racial tensions that were absent in universalistic tradition of European Enlightenment, the historical mischaracterization becomes the bedrock for xenophobia. Centeno’s claim about Latin American racism gives the impression that race was somehow a solved issue in European

European models, Latin American cases  87 national communities, a conclusion that, even if debatable, is only possible by detaching those nations from their imperial spaces. Therefore, the disconnection of early modern Europe is linked with the reified and civilizing notions on the nation-state, political modernity, citizenship. In a sense, as historical sociology once approached the “history from below” in the 1970s to renew its collective action theory, perhaps it is time to rediscover anti-Eurocentric new historiographies’ potential for revealing reciprocal causations, layering spatialities and reconstructing concepts. For a number of reasons, Latin American history seems a promising terrain for this reconstructive effort; in fact, Latin American social thinking proved itself aware of the limitations of nationally bounded social reasoning long before the recent boom on post-colonial, global, transnational and connected scholarship claimed to provincialize Europe (Adelman, 2005; Marquese and Pimenta, 2015). By assuming state formation as a systemic process, and as such is inseparable from empire-building and colonial governmentality, what would it mean to provincialize the initial picture of the Westphalian system of sovereign states? First, if colonialism matters, the statement of European-based sovereignty must be trespassed with its organized denial by colonial rule overseas. More precisely, sovereignty principle from its inception was refracted by what Partha Chatterjee (1993) has called the “rule of colonial difference”: while in Europe, it intended to join exclusive self-rule with abstract equality among nations, in colonial world it meant exclusive metropolitan authority, an external mandate to rule over nations, convert and civilize them. If projected beyond Europe, the universal framework of sovereignty divides the world between a closed inner circle of sovereign-claiming authorities, formally equal under international law, and the open frontier of colonial conquest, where such authorities could claim rights over peoples (Keene, 2004). In that sense, interstate system was symbolically made out of Tordesillas as much as it was from Westphalia; moreover, intra-­European Westphalian legal system made sense precisely it was not colonialist T ­ ordesillas, and viceversa. Two sets of political and moral behaviour split as, in early modern Europe, an imperial imaginary geography is emerging. Again, this split is not presented here for strictly historical purposes, but to serve as platform for a non-diffusionist argument about Third World post-colonial polities. The standard narrative implies a worldwide expansion of universalistic Westphalian principles over the last two centuries, embracing all nations into an UN-shaped international community.4 Presuming exclusively European origins of modernity, it restates the temporal asymmetry of Eurocentric thinking: “first in the West, and then elsewhere” (Chakrabarty, 2000: 6). From an anticolonial perspective, one could hardly agree that the non-interventionist self-rule principle was not applied to, say, Tupis, Araucanos or Iroquois because it had not arrived yet in America by the time they were conquered and slaughtered. There was no passive absence of sovereignty as self-rule, but an active denial of this status by imperial

88  Pedro dos Santos de Borba sovereign powers: these people all laid outside the perimeter of plausible aspiration of self-rule, and so were to be ruled. It was not lack, deviance or unmoderness, but colonial difference that was in motion. The point, then, is that sovereignty and its denial operate as two moving poles of modern international politics, not in a transitional previous stage but in ongoing and ever-changing historical forms. The very fact that former colonies are now independent states should be, then, dissociated from the diffusionist image of a universal principle progressing into world emptiness. Being a static and legal abstraction, sovereignty itself has no drive for expansion worldwide. The non-Westphalian politics, on the other hand, is made of concrete initiatives that allows power to emerge out of legal standards, revealing – in various forms of imperialism, intervention, conquest and colonial rule – an outward propulsion. If former colonies are now sovereign states, the crucial explaining mechanism lies not in sovereignty itself, but in the politics of its enduring denial. In an interstate system pushed by competing imperial claims, “countries that wanted to escape from this kind of external rule had to declare themselves sovereign states and win recognition as such from the Western powers” (Karatani, 2014: 168). If successful, this movement alters the relation between the circle of rightful claims for sovereignty and the concrete ­practices of its denial. That is, I believe, a theoretical ground for post-­ colonial states that displaces methodological nationalism and Eurocentric diffusionism, regarding sovereignty as a contingent claim in the unequal formation of interstate system. Instead of a serial replication of their E ­ uropean counterparts, post-colonial states are specific situations within the historical backlash against expansionist, sovereign-claiming, European-based empires. The struggles for political independence in the Americas, Africa and Asia, despite their enormous differences, are parts of the ongoing contentious politics of sovereignty in modern world-system. Theoretically, the notion of sovereignty denial is derived on the epistemic potential of exception, as first explored by Carl Schmitt (2009). By looking at critical situations in which prevailing norms are superseded by concrete decisions, one can better perceive political resolution underneath legal order. As so, that is an aggregate notion of practices that circumscribe or displace Westphalian principles, allowing for an expansive dynamic of the interstate system. Certainly, such practices are not historically homogeneous: the forms of sovereignty denial are intelligible in relation to prevalent norms of sovereign recognition in a given context. Even modern colonialism, at closer look, aggregates a very heterogeneous set of historical practices of rule (Cooper, 2005). Instead of dismembering into its particulars, the point here is to underscore a general feature: beyond its positive legal existence among equals, sovereignty in modern world-system implies a decision over the self-rule of others, a claim of power over peoples who are uncivilized or unhuman, unable to govern themselves, unable to control potential threats, unable to respect universal rights, that is, unfit for or outside the perimeter

European models, Latin American cases  89 of modern sovereignty among peoples. As Edward Said (1979: 34) famously argued, “England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt”. In an asymmetric interstate system, the division between recognized and non-recognized claims for sovereign self-rule is a moving edge, which does not mean that sovereignty is merely a legal fiction, nor that we are still evolving towards its universalization. Because the legal and abstract order of mutually exclusive sovereign powers is impossible as concrete reality, the moving forms of asymmetric violation/exclusion fill the gap and make the general rule survive as such. When one talks about the principle of sovereignty in the margins, it is hard to avoid the pressing fact that its violation is an ongoing exceptionalism that makes the international legal order possible. That is, from the point of view of the people who have their autonomy consistently violated throughout history, the principle of sovereignty becomes a slippery rhetoric or an inside privilege of others.

The boundering of political membership: contentious politics in the fault lines of inclusion The preceding section gave some indications to re-position sovereignty and colonialism in our understanding of modern interstate system. Nevertheless, it neglects an important issue: who exactly claims sovereign rule in post-­ colonial states, in the name of whom, and against whom – that is, a question of political boundering. In this section, I will recover the original concerns of Miguel Ángel Centeno and François-Xavier Guerra to move beyond them. First, I believe that Centeno’s overemphasis on war-making misses the central argument of contentious politics research agenda, which was to blur the (theoretical and scholarly) frontiers on the study of collective forms of political conflict. To detach Clausewitzian war as a unique and ­homogeneous explanatory variable is an unfair modelling, which is half way to conclude, as he did, that the state-making process was unfulfilled, or had the “wrong tools”, “wrong time” and “wrong places” (Centeno, 2002: 127–140). Ironically, this warmongering redux of Tilly’s original research program produces for Weberian sociology an analogous effect of disorientation they had imputed on orthodox Marxists that took too literally the opening sentences of the Communist Manifesto. Indeed, the presumption of bounded and self-conscious opposing classes moving history has found trouble in dealing with Latin American history, sometimes reproducing Eurocentric biases, sometimes reinventing itself quite creatively. Both class struggle and interstate war are relevant parts of the politics of organized violence, but it is unfruitful to keep the debate in terms of one or the other. Again, by misrepresenting European causal chains one is led to deduce the abnormality of non-European experiences. The insight of Tilly and his partners was to explore the parallels of apparently distant forms of contentious politics, such as nationalism, war, tax

90  Pedro dos Santos de Borba riots, democratization, social movements, ethnic conflicts, state-building and so on (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 2004). In other words, they plea against ordering conflict and violence into normative and theoretical boxes, underscoring the contingency inherent to strategic interaction between actors. In this context, the causal reciprocity between war-making and state formation in Europe should be read less as an experimental concomitant variation (more total war, stronger states), but rather like a trigger of openended conflict around the growing mobilization of capital and coercion. As conducting large-scale wars is analytically inseparable from conscription and exaction, one should remind that “intervening between war-making and the extension of citizenship is contention” (Tarrow, 2015: 242). Although certainly aware of this link, the so-called “warmongering approach” fails to draw its full implications. First of all, the study of state formation in Latin America should depart not from an abstractly expected war model, but from the concrete disputes around concentration of capital and coercion in the long term. By assuming such starting point, one could rebuild the historical streams of contentious politics featured, besides interstate war, by indigenous struggle for land and autonomy, movements against slavery, capital-labour contention, armed uprisings against centralizing impetus, collective action for and against religion and church, agrarian revolutions, partisan strife and electoral juggling, tax riots, police intimidation and repression, massive urban rallies, revolts against conscription, nationalist rallies and so on. Rather than organizing this mess into a teleological process, the point is to acknowledge such indeterminate violent friction around authority precisely as state-making. The scope and character of state organizations are given for this very process of contention as protection rackets eventually stabilize into formal organizations – in Latin America as elsewhere. Instead of studying wars to measure how effective they were according to the explanatory model, one should distinguish the actual conflicts that shaped every critical juncture in state formation. This appraisal drops the need for substantial notions of deviance or lack in retrospective evaluation. The last important consequence of framing contentious politics in this conceptually broader and methodologically more indeterminate way is, so to say, temporal. The warmongering redux freezes the nineteenth century as the period when post-colonial states were (or were not) formed, producing arguments of congenital failure that steadily explain latter history up to the present. On contrary, recovering contingency means that state formation is an ongoing process, not a previous and circumscribed stage which ends when a supposedly modern state is finally born. In other words, if there is no clear endpoint for state-making, there is no plausible stark separation between a historically remote violent formation (be it finished, uncompleted or deviant) and its present-day forms, which indeed remain violent. Of course, any researcher has to do its temporal and spatial choices to make

European models, Latin American cases  91 his work feasible, but this methodological selection does not confound itself with theoretical definitions on change over time. If we now turn to Guerra’s investigation of modernity as cultural mutation, the consequence is that those “modern” conceptions of representation and law-making are not ideological artefacts separated from that long-term contention over authority and obedience. In fact, if rooted in concrete disputes, they are better understood as reflexive ways of organizing political action since, “like all of social life, mobilization is suffused throughout with collective efforts at interpretation and social construction” (McAdam, ­Tarrow and Tilly, 2004: 48). In place of intellectual architects of political ­institutions, even if firmly convinced to act as such, political sociology would reach further by embedding social utopias in the contingent world of unintended outcomes, conflicting interests and circumstantial compromises. In this sense, contentious politics in the long-run is not reduced to a never-ending agonism of wars, strikes and riots but it also embraces an ethical-­political dispute around what is to be considered fair, needed or unbearable, to whom, when and under what justification. The central reason for this repositioning is that it decidedly opens room for subaltern political agency. Instead of a conflict between enlightened elites against traditionalism, one is able to frame different and incompatible ideals of what it is a good society, and the role the state might have in it or not. During the Latin American independence processes, for instance, there were indeed Eurodescendent republicans fighting for abstract equality and secularization, as well as there were enslaved and illiterate people struggling for a free society with no white lords. While indigenous groups in Guatemala or southern Chile tried to protect at any cost their autonomy from political domination, there were elsewhere slave holders trying to preserve their status through liberal private property reasoning. The clash of these aspirations, shaped by largely unequal resources for mobilization, is precisely political modernity in the making. Thus, to overcome certain elitist bias of intellectual history, one should assume popular utopias and imaginaries as equally valid triggers for action, since they frame obedience and revolt in terms of shared beliefs of a properly ordered society. In other words, not only highly educated statesmen chase their view of proper political order, but so does every active social movement inasmuch as moral outrage with injustice becomes, as a notorious sociologist once said, an “infusion of iron into the human soul to give it the power to judge and to act” (Moore Jr, 1979: 82). Obviously, acknowledging merit in popular senses of justice does not imply a symmetry with the power of elites to shape political institutions. But the fact that these popular claims were mostly defeated or silenced along the process does not allow us to lump them together into “traditional” resistance to modernity, and even less to conclude that they are inconsequential. Both inferences induce an awkward echo of the discourse of the victors.

92  Pedro dos Santos de Borba The idea that state formation analysis should be rooted in contentious politics is the ground for the last proposition of our line of thought, namely, that universalistic discourses on citizenship and nation lie on concrete practices of political boundering. Eurocentric political sociology has largely appealed to certain teleology of political inclusion, in which non-citizens are progressively incorporated as an historical self-fulfilment of a universal principle. It replicates in national scale the diffusionist argument on sovereignty previously sketched: in this case, instead of Third World polities absorbed into international society, women, unpropertied, coloured, illiterate are to be included, stage by stage, in the political realm of citizenship rights. Likewise, this picture omits concrete practices of exclusion that were in the very conception of citizenship in historical terms. As Bhambra (2015) detailed for the United States, women and black people were non-citizens not for provisional expediency, but essentially because citizenship was designed in terms of a white male privilege to outrank them. As prerogative of private property and free-contracting subjecthood, equal citizenship made sense exactly because it was not universal, but selective: it was the political entitlement of the owners. Moreover, Carole Pateman (1988) has demonstrated how the social contract theories themselves operated this twist, by stating rights for men (as free individuals in a public sphere) while forcing women into patriarchy (through a sexual contract for private sphere). As Pateman shows, women citizenship was not yet to arrive; it was precisely in order to deny it that male citizenship was in motion. Again, the colonial experience was remarkable in developing concrete practices of political boundering. Through the elaboration of “internal colonialism” (González Casanova, 2006), “colonial difference” (Chatterjee, 1993) or “political society” (Chatterjee, 2004), critical theory has tried to deal with reproducing forms of boundering that shaped an inner social circle of republican equality in post-colonial societies. As should be clear by now, it is misleading to assume this selectivity as inauthentic or decayed versions of the original modern universalism. The core lexicon of membership in modernity (citizen, nation, people, liberty and so on) was everywhere universal in the very extent of their inward limits. As in the case of sovereignty, the point of view of those who had their rights denied shed light on the exclusionary background of universalistic discourse. So, there is no dualism between practices of inclusion and exclusion; rather, they are reciprocal in a sense that inclusion is intelligible in terms of its exclusionary aftereffects, and vice-versa. The idea of moving and reciprocal lines of inclusion and exclusion is a form to explore a non-diffusionist approach on political membership. Instead of a preconceived notion of totality community, nation is rather one possible lexicon of political boundering, whose content has significantly varied along time and place. Contrastingly, the grammar of exception is also historical and open to political manoeuvring: Communists, savages, Jews, barbarians, criminals, immigrants, troublemakers or infidels are examples

European models, Latin American cases  93 of discursive targeting of otherness that travel way beyond colonial or enslaving contexts. The denial of equal subjecthood is not a dye-harding remain of the past, but a moving strategy by power-holders to outlaw groups, behaviours and spaces under established universalistic standards. As we know from nominalist Hobbes to Nietzschean Foucault, power is exercised as ongoing practice of naming and labelling for domination to be possible. Thus, instead of a directional march into all-embracing political inclusion, political boundering is a contingent effort of anchor political order, through practices of membership recognition and denial. On the other hand, the modulations of universalist principles are not pure power exercise of labelling and naming. Rather, they are potential objects of contentious politics inasmuch as they violate shared senses of justice, entitlement and self-respect, paving way for claims, conflicts and bargaining over political boundering. After all, if any changes in expectations of political recognition happened back in time, and they undoubtedly did, it was not due to the self-fulfilling nature of universal citizenship, but to the action of those who, by disputing over concrete consequences of national and citizen belonging, ended up by changing the very meaning of these words.

Notes 1 This problem has been detected by Charles Tilly (1975) in his seminal essay and was restated more cogently by Wolfgang Knöbl (2013). 2 In the line of thought presently developed, it is secondary to remind the historical inaccuracies around the foundational mythology of the Treaty of Westphalia signed in 1648. 3 The most common ways to present these assumptions are in terms of contrasting “initial conditions” for early modern Europe and postcolonial or Third World state-building processes, as well as path-dependent “sequencing” between them. 4 To pick one example, Habermas states plain and simple: the historical type of that state which first appeared with the French and American revolutions has spread world-wide. […] After World War II a third generation of nation-states emerged from the processes of decolonization. The trend continues since the implosion of the Soviet empire. (Habermas, 1996: 281)

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94  Pedro dos Santos de Borba Bhambra, Gurminder (2007) Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bhambra, Gurminder (2014) Connected Sociologies. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bhambra, Gurminder (2015) “Citizens and Others: The Constitution of Citizenship through Exclusion.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 40, no. 2, 102–114. Blaut, James (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York and London: Guilford Press. Borón, Atilio (2003) Estado, capitalismo y democracia en América Latina. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Centeno, Miguel Angel (1997) “Blood and Debt: War and Taxation in Nineteenth Century Latin America.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 102, no. 6, 1565–1605. Centeno, Miguel Angel (2002) Blood and Debt: War and Nation-state in Latin ­America. University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Post-colonial Thought and ­Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, Partha (2004) Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Cooper, Frederick (2005) Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Deyon, Pierre (1969) Le mercantilisme. Paris: Flammarion. Domingues, José Maurício (2008) Latin American Contemporary Modernity: A ­Sociological Interpretation. London: Routledge. Drinot, Paul, and Knight, Alan (ed.) (2014) The Great Depression in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. González Casanova, Pablo (2006) Sociología de la explotación. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Guerra, François-Xavier (2000) Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las ­revoluciones hispanoamericanas. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Gunder Frank, Andre (1969) Latin America, Underdevelopment of Revolution: ­Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1996) “The European Nation-state – Its Achievements and Its Limits: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship.” In G. ­Balakrishnan (ed.) Mapping the Nation. London and New York: Verso (New Left Review), 281–294. Karatani, Kojin (2014) Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keene, Edward (2004) Beyond Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knöbl, Wolfgang (2003) “Theories that Won’t Pass Away: The Never-ending Story of Modernization Theory.” In G. Delanty and E. Isin (eds.) Handbook of H ­ istorical Sociology. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 96–107. Knöbl, Wolfgang (2011) “La contingencia de la independencia y de la revolución: perspectivas teóricas y comparadas sobre América Latina.” América Latina Hoy, vol. 17, no. 57, 15–49. Knöbl, Wolfgang (2013) “State-building in Western Europe and the Americas in the Long Nineteenth Century: Some Preliminary Considerations.” In M. A. Centeno

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5 Forgotten Europes Rethinking regional entanglements from the Caribbean Manuela Boatcă

…the trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means. (Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 1988)

Any reflection on regional entanglements needs to start from one’s own positioning within them. I was born and raised in Romania during the state socialist regime and went to Germany over twenty years ago in order to study sociology. It took me a few years to realize that, rather than just studying in Germany, I had migrated and was there to stay. This back-and-forth between Romania and Germany is the very location I am speaking from. In turn, this also means that I am speaking from the border between Western Europe and one of its other Europes – the one that, at different moments in its history, has been defined as Eastern Europe and is often still reduced to being an Other within. The Europe dominating the discourse about the modern, civilized, developed and white world is always, at least implicitly, Western Europe, and as such is an instance of what Maria Todorova (1997) has labelled an “unmarked category”. By contrast, all other Europes are considered particular and partial and have to be made explicit, that is, they are marked categories: Eastern and Southern Europe are often considered lesser Europes and have to be specifically mentioned to be included. Black Europe has for a long time been unthinkable and in need of justification and to this day needs to be argued, defended and explained (Raphael-­ Hernandez, 2004; Hine, Keaton and Small, 2009; Boatcă, 2017). Unmarked Europe plays the dominant role in the historiography of Western colonial powers as well as in the social theory emerged during European colonialism and subsequently seen as applicable to the entire world. In most sociological accounts, the Europe hailed as a standard of civilization, modernity, development, capitalism or human rights was poorly or not at all defined and rarely broken down into any subdivisions, except when synecdochally reduced to its hegemonic variant, Western Europe. At the same time, this unspecified entity was overwhelmingly presented as an autonomous, institutionally self-sustaining, and, at least since the “age

Forgotten Europes  97 of industry”, economically and politically self-contained region. As such, “­Europe” was supposed to be always a step ahead of the regions to which it was being compared, but unrelated to, and essentially unlike them. This Europe – whose self-image and epistemic self-positioning I have elsewhere called “heroic” (Boatcă, 2010, 2013, 2015) – features prominently both in the self-referential historiography of Western European colonial powers and in the social theory emerged during European colonialism. The above motto from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is therefore a fitting description for both the self-referential historiography of European colonial powers more generally and for much of European social theory. Core sociological categories such as class, reflecting the specific historical and socioeconomic context of Western European industrial society, channelled attention to processes peculiar to that context rather than to those transcending it, and to Western Europe to the detriment of other regions. As a result, class conflict, pauperization and social mobility within self-­proclaimed industrial nations became more visible than colonialism, the trade in enslaved Africans, and European emigration to the Americas, and were disproportionately represented in mainstream sociological theory both within and outside the West. It is only in the past twenty years that sociology’s systematic neglect of the dynamics of colonialism and imperialism and of the resulting ­structural entanglements of power between world ­regions has been denounced as Eurocentrism or Occidentalism (Chakrabarty, 2000; Hall, 2006 [1992]) and calls for its decolonization have ensued (Walsh, Schiwy and Castro-Gómez, 2002; Connell, 2007; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Boatcă and Costa, 2016). The present chapter advances instead a more encompassing notion of ­Europe as a creolized space: it takes into account the regional entanglements to which European colonialism and imperialism have given rise since the sixteenth century and rethinks Europe from its unacknowledged borders in the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea. In order to show how “creolization” as a term originally coined to describe processes specific to the Caribbean speaks to a different understanding of Europe up to this day, the history and the concept of Caribbean Europe are used to shed light on a previously developed notion of multiple and unequal Europes (Boatcă, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015). The paper ultimately argues that a rethinking of Europe from its A ­ tlantic and Caribbean borders successfully challenges Occidentalist notions of Europeanness and the modern nation-state, as well as related notions of internal and external borders, sovereignty and modernity.

Creolizing Europe The most common as well as the most long-standing internal differentiation within Europe has been a constructed East-West division that periodically transferred geopolitical, economic and cultural differences into

98  Manuela Boatcă ahistorical essences, traditions or paths of Eastern and Western Europe. The European East thereby regularly sanctioned Western Europe’s position as the norm while partly acquiring attributes of a larger East in being portrayed as Oriental or “somehow Asian” (Lewis and Wigen, 1997: 7; ­Bakić-Hayden, 1995). Various attempts at scientific orderliness have included pinpointing a third zone in-between East and West as well as further subdividing the shifty Eastern Europe into North, ­C entral (­n ineteenth-century ­Mitteleuropa) and South Eastern Europe (“the ­Balkans”), respectively. Thus, the concept of “Europe” has never had a mere geographic referent, but has instead always reflected both the geopolitics and the epistemology of the various historical moments and the global power relations characterizing them. However, political maps that represent distinct continents not only naturalize them as common-sensical entities but also suggest that they are made up of nation-states that fit continental borders. Transcontinental states such as Turkey, Egypt or Russia are thus posited as anomalies in need of explanation (Lewis and Wigen, 1997: 9). In the case of Europe in particular, such naturalization has the absurd effect of generating anomalies from the definition of a continent that is itself anomalous. Thus, many European states have territories outside continental Europe: Cyprus is, strictly speaking, located in West Asia, on the Anatolian Plate, Malta and Sicily are on the African continental plate. If, however, geographical incongruities result in a few exceptions to the rule, it is colonial history that reveals exceptions as systematic and the rule itself as a function of the political economy of global capitalism. Today, the European Union (EU) includes thirty-four overseas “entities” resulted from the colonial involvement of six European member states: Denmark, France, the Netherlands, ­Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom (Figure 5.1). Of these, nine are part of France, Portugal and Spain and thus full-fledged EU members; they are considered “outermost regions” of the EU and are subject to EU legislation (the acquis communautaire) ­(European Parliament, 2016). The remaining twenty-five, awkwardly described in official language as “countries that have a special relationship to one of the Member States of the European Community” (EEAS, 2016), are colonies of Denmark, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; they are not part of the single market, yet their nationals are EU citizens. These Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) as a whole feature among the regions in the European Commission’s list of partners in “international cooperation and development”. Including the OCTs as a “region” in it is not only telling for the anomalous status they hold within the EU and ironic in the face of their being geographically spread across three of the world’s oceans. It reveals the extent to which geographical and political categories – from “countries” and “territories” to “regions” – are used as placeholders for the appropriate term, “colonies” and their historical genealogies disguised under euphemisms such as “special relations”.

Source: Alexrk2/CC BY-SA 3.0 available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0.

Figure 5.1  Map of the EU overseas countries and territories and outermost regions 2015.

100  Manuela Boatcă In spite of such formal acknowledgement, official EU discourse foregrounds continental Europe to the detriment of all other territories – most of which are former colonies – that are part of European countries, but are geographically located in other continents. In the process, it links Europeanness to a narrowly defined physical location which excludes both the memory and the present of Europe’s colonial ties to other regions. With the discourse of the EU, we thus witness the re-emergence of a “moral geography” of the continent, with profound implications for the identity politics, citizenship rights, military and monetary policy of the excluded countries (Muller, 2001). The pervasive civilizing discourse situates the EU at the top of a value hierarchy derived from the historical legacy and the current political role of its member states, viewed as exemplary in both cases.

Introducing multiple and unequal Europes The discourse surrounding the emergence, establishment and, later, expansion of the EU has been gradually monopolizing the label of “Europe” such that only its twenty-eight member states or at most those about to become members are considered “European” and consequently included in the term. As a result, processes of accession to the EU have consistently been defined as “Europeanization”, irrespective of the already geographically European location of the candidate states, from the 2004 enlargement round to the 2007 inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria. At the same time, Europe’s remaining colonies overseas are graphically represented as part of the EU in official maps, yet play no part in the definition of either the normative European ideal or the corresponding common identity. The fact that they are situated outside a continental European location was never mobilized in a discourse of exclusion from Europe directed at these territories on account of any supposed cultural, political or economic difference. As shown above, administratively, most are either a part of the European states which colonized them and, by extension, of the EU, or have associated status within it; they are included in official EU maps, their citizens have EU citizenships; Portugal’s “autonomous regions” Azores and Madeira, Spain’s “autonomous community” of the Canary Islands and the French overseas departments all use the Euro as their official currency and are represented on Euro banknotes (Figure 5.2), which the European ­Central Bank claims “show a geographical representation of ­Europe” (­European Central Bank, 2017). The presence (and absence) of overseas territories on the banknotes is explained away with reference to their size while their connection with Europe appears almost accidental: “The tiny boxes near the bottom of the banknote show the Canary Islands and some overseas territories of France where the euro is also used” (European Central Bank, 2017, emphasis mine).

Forgotten Europes  101

Figure 5.2  EU’s colonies on Euro banknotes. Source: European Central Bank (2017), available at: www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/design/html/index.en.html.

In fact, as Karis Muller has pointed out early on, when superimposed on the official EU map, the areas covered by the euro provide “a time lagged photograph of colonization” (Muller, 2000: 328). Against this background, the discursive construction of a singular notion of Europe crucially depends on the silencing of the historical role of its member states and their predecessors in creating the main structures of global political and economic inequality during European colonial rule. As Böröcz and Sarkar have argued, the member states of the EU before the 2004 “Eastern enlargement” were “the same states that had exercised imperial rule over nearly half of the inhabitable surface of the globe outside Europe” (Böröcz and Sarkar, 2005: 162) and whose colonial possessions covered almost half of the inhabited surface of the non-European world. The thirty-four colonial possessions still under the direct control EU member states today represent more than half of the fifty-eight remaining colonies worldwide (Dependencies and Territories of the World, 2016). This is not a coincidence. The overseas empires of today’s EU states such as Britain, the Netherlands, France and Belgium had been many times larger than the current size of their territories. The loss of colonial empires after Second World War therefore significantly fuelled the political impetus behind the creation of the European

102  Manuela Boatcă Economic Community, the EU’s predecessor, to which the contribution of remaining colonies was seen as decisive (Muller, 2001; Hansen and Jonsson, 2014). Upon its founding in 1957, the European Economic Community included not just Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany but also their colonial possessions, officially referred to as “overseas countries and territories”, the same category used today for the remaining colonial possessions: […] they included, most importantly, Belgian Congo and French West and Equatorial Africa, whereas Algeria, which in this time was an integral part of metropolitan France, was formally integrated into the EEC yet excluded from certain provisions of the Treaty. (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 7) In turn, the “moral geography” at work today denotes the symbolic representation of the European continent reflecting the civilizing discourse advanced by its main colonial powers. Most telling in this regard were the official maps of the EU shortly before the 2004 enlargement round (­Figure 5.3), in which the European continent was color-coded to reflect the “different speeds” of accession and, by extension, the candidate countries’ closeness to the European ideal. Yellow were the member states until 2004. Blue were the ten new members that joined that year. Romania and Bulgaria, that had been denied access in the 2004 enlargement round, were represented in purple, as was Turkey, which has been a candidate to accession since 1986. At the same time, Europe’s overseas colonial territories, while graphically represented as part of the EU (light grey in the Figure 5.3, just like the full member states), played no part in the definition of ­either the European ideal or the corresponding common identity. Their location outside of continental Europe never triggered a discourse of exclusion. At most, their existence is instrumentalized in triumphalist and celebratory discourses of the m ­ etropole, as in the case of France’s “année de l’outre mer” in 2011 – which, among other things, claimed the biodiversity of the French overseas departments for ­Europe as a whole (Éduscol, 2011; Vergès, 2015). The very opposite is the case for Turkey, whose “semi-Asian” location – across the anomalous continental divide between Europe and Asia – has repeatedly been part of the arguments of denying it EU membership decades before the start of the Erdogan regime. The implicit geopolitical imaginary at work here presupposes an ontological and moral scale ranging from a geographically Western Europe, whose modern, democratic and pacific character – and therefore superiority  – ­remain unquestioned, up to a backward, violent and inferior part – as such of questionable Europeanness – frequently located in the Eastern part of the continent. The discourse of European unity and singularity thus paradoxically reinforces a historically consistent politics of difference within Europe that can best be described as a hierarchy of multiple and unequal Europes emerging in the sixteenth century (see Boatcă, 2013, 2015).

Source: European Commission, Audiovisual Services, public domain https://ec.europa.eu/avservices/photo/photoDetails. cfm?sitelang=en&ref=010281#0.

Figure 5.3  Map of the EU enlargement 2004.

104  Manuela Boatcă The different Europes making up this hierarchy are the result of power shifts within the continent until the eighteenth century and therefore have different and unequal roles in shaping the hegemonic definition of modernity and in ensuring its propagation. Four multiple and unequal ­Europes surface in the dominant (Western) European discourse (­Table 5.1): decadent Europe (which had lost both hegemony and, accordingly, the epistemic power of defining a hegemonic Self and its subaltern Others); paradigmatically represented by the early colonial powers Spain and Portugal; heroic Europe (self-defined as the producer of modernity’s main achievements), primarily represented by the new colonial powers and self-proclaimed leaders of modernity’s main revolutions, the French Revolution and industrialization – France and England; epigonal Europe (defined via its alleged lack of these achievements and hence as a mere re-producer of the stages covered by heroic Europe), best epitomized by Southeastern Europe and the Balkans; and, lastly, forgotten Europe, the colonial possessions never included in the definitions of Europe, modernity or the Western nation-state, although they were economically indispensable for these achievements and administratively integral parts of Western European states until well into the twentieth century and some even today. While “decadent Europe” and “epigonal Europe” were both characterized by a semi-peripheral position, their different trajectories in having achieved this position acted towards disuniting rather than uniting them in their interests: In Spain and Portugal, the memory of lost power and the dominion of imperial languages induced the awareness of a decline from the core, that is, an imperial nostalgia. Instead, in that part of the continent that had only emerged as “­Europe” due to the growing demise of the Ottoman Empire – that is, Eastern Europe and the Balkans – the rise to the position of semi-periphery within the world economy alongside the enduring position of periphery within Europe itself made the aspiration to E ­ uropeanness – defined as Western modernity  – the Table 5.1  Multiple Europes Europe

Prototype

Decadent Spain, Portugal Heroic France, England Epigonal “The Balkans” Forgotten British Virgin Islands Source: own elaboration.

Role in the history of modernity

World-system Attitude position

Role in coloniality

Participant

SemiNostalgia periphery Core Hegemony

Founding

Producer

Central

Reproducer SemiAspiration Accomplice periphery Reproducer Periphery Ambivalent Instrumental

Forgotten Europes  105 dominant attitude. In the case of forgotten Europe, attitudes have ranged between the strong desire for decolonization, leading to the independence of most territories under European domination in the wake of Second World War, to the voluntary relinquishing of sovereignty in exchange for EU citizenship and economic integration in the monetary union that to this day characterizes parts of the Dutch Antilles, the British Virgin Islands, the French overseas departments – which, since 2011, also include Mayotte. Thus, the subdivisions underlying the imperial map of multiple Europes had served to positively sanction the hegemony of “heroic Europe”: France, England and Germany, as epitomes of what Hegel had called “the heart of Europe”, became the only authority capable of imposing a universal definition of modernity and at the same time of deploying its imperial projects in the remaining Europes or through them. Such a model is nevertheless inevitably incomplete and meant to serve heuristic purposes, not to exhaustively or even partially explain the trajectory of any European region in the longue durée. On the basis of its most prototypical examples, however, the model of multiple Europes as sketched above does help illuminate the impact that the direct or indirect involvement in the extra-European colonial endeavour has had on the definition power associated with a region’s structural position within the modern/colonial world-system in general and within Europe in particular. In other words, the further away from the historical experience of heroic Europe a part of Europe is or has been, the less definition power it has tended to have with respect to discourses of modernity, European identity or both.

Forgotten Europes Thus, in a hierarchy of “multiple and unequal Europes” that ranges from heroic to decadent to epigonal in terms of the role attributed to each in the achievement of modernity, the EU’s overseas territories appear as “forgotten Europe” – they are literally “off the chart” in terms of Europe’s self-representation and modernity’s checklist, yet “on the map” in terms of the claims laid to them by continental European states. While there is a – however imprecise – geographical referent for heroic Europe in the (North) Western part of the continent, decadent Europe in the South(west), and epigonal Europe in the (South)East, there is none for forgotten Europe. This is not only due to the fact that Europe’s overseas countries, territories and outermost regions are spread out across the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the P ­ acific and Indian Oceans and thus not easily pinpointed to any one location. Rather, the lack of a referent for what ultimately are colonial outposts is a result of the coloniality of memory that prevents any overarching category from gaining legitimacy as a region of Europe: References that occasionally or more systematically feature in public discourse tend to be

106  Manuela Boatcă linked to the imperial history of individual states, as in the case of labels such as the “Dutch Caribbean”, the “British West Indies” or “­Françafrique”. Yet they never point to the integral part that colonial possessions have played in the consolidation of European economic and geopolitical power as a whole or to the present-day continuities in Western Europe’s entanglement with and policies towards them. As an overarching category, “forgotten Europe” therefore helps stress the fact that some of the multiple Europes are more unthinkable than others: Epigonal “Eastern” Europe is white but not quite, Christian but not ­Western Christian, while parts of it are not Christian at all. Its geographical location in Europe is unquestioned, although its EU accession was piecemeal and remains incomplete. The modernity of individual Eastern E ­ uropean states has repeatedly been tied to their EU membership status and seen as a gradual process of “Europeanization”. In turn, in the case of the C ­ aribbean territories of current EU members, it is the African and Asian heritage of their populations and their predominantly syncretic religions that, together with their remote geographical location, decisively unsettle Europe’s prevailing self-definition as continental, white and Christian. The C ­ aribbean’s history of slavery – linked in the dominant discourse to backward, inefficient, unfree and non-white labour – served for a long time as a stark contrast to the presumed freedom, modernity and high productivity of the wage-labour of white Europeans. Within forgotten Europe, the Caribbean colonies thus offer both a prime vantage point for upending the dominant understanding and representation of Europe and a concrete basis for a coherent geographic referent of this hitherto unthinkable category. The fact that more than a third of the EU’s colonial possessions are located in the Caribbean today warrants an engagement with what I would like to call “Caribbean Europe” – the integral but invisibilized part of an otherwise highly visible Europe. I view it as encompassing all Caribbean territories previously colonized by a European power and presently administered as dependencies of a EU member, the formal colonial relation to which still figures in the euphemism of their current official denomination – from “­territory” to “municipality”, “community” or “department” of a European state. This is not to discount the coloniality of power underlying the many non-­administrative ties of dependence still tying formally independent C ­ aribbean territories to Europe. Instead, my goal is to highlight the enduring colonial (rather than neocolonial) nature of administrative ties still in force today. ­According to this definition, Caribbean Europe currently includes the French overseas departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe and French ­Guiana, and the French overseas community of St. Martin from among the EU’s “outermost regions”; and the French St.  Barthélemy, the British Virgin Islands, ­Anguilla, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and Turks and ­Caicos as well as the Dutch Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Bonaire, Saba and Sint ­Eustatius from among the EU’s “overseas countries and territories” (OCTs) (see F ­ igure 5.4, as well as the overview in Bonilla, 2015: 7f.).

Forgotten Europes  107

Figure 5.4  Map of the Caribbean with its European and US-American colonial possessions. Source: World atlas, detailed Map of the Caribbean, available at: http://reservationsbvi.com/ maps/#caribbean, reproduced by kind permission.

As such, Caribbean Europe represents only one instance of the multiple ­ uropes actively forgotten through the coloniality of memory at work in E the dominant EU discourse. A similar case could be made for an ­African ­Europe on account of the French outermost regions of Réunion and ­Mayotte and Spain’s “enclaves” Ceuta and Melilla or for a Pacific Europe on account of French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna as well as the British Pitcairn ­Islands. However, as the first region in the Americas to be claimed by ­European powers as early as 1492 and one that received more than a third of the 12.5 million Africans trafficked in the European slave trade from the sixteenth to the ­nineteenth centuries, the Caribbean has had the longest and the most complex history of entanglement with Europe. It also has been the site of several strategic EU projects and activities throughout the twentieth century and until today: As the coloniality of memory actively and consistently produces these territories as absent from and unthinkable within the European discourse, it repeatedly taps into their potential to act as Europe’s military and naval bases, sites of medical experiments, spaceports and tax havens, as well as laboratories of neoliberal economics or warfare, to name but a few of their functions (for more, see Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 2; ­Bonilla, 2015: 184f.). The notion of forgotten Europes advanced here is not intended to claim OCTs for Europe in a renewed, theoretically and epistemically colonial gesture. Rather, it is meant to creolize the very notion of Europe by

108  Manuela Boatcă drawing attention to the decisive shifts that colonial possessions operate in both its historical legacies and its present borders when colonial possessions are consistently taken into account. The project of creolizing Europe is therefore contingent upon creolizing social theory so as to re-­i nscribe the transnational experiences of regions othered as non-­European and non-Western or racialized as non-white – such as the Caribbean – as well as the multiple entanglements between Europe and its colonies into sociological thought. In this sense, the concrete notion of Caribbean ­Europe can be seen as an instance of what Lionnet and Shih have called “the becoming theory of the minor” – thinking through and with invisibilized, peripheral, or subaltern formations, or thinking from coloniality: “If minor formations become method and theory, then new analytics will be brought to the foreground to creolize the universalisms we live with today, doing so from the bottom up and from the inside out” (Lionnet and Shih, 2011: 21). What does the creolization of Europe through the lens of its Caribbean colonies look like concretely? In other words, what does Europe look like when its Caribbean component is remembered? In the following, I discuss two different but related aspects impacted by this shift of perspective and point at other areas where this impact can be felt. Creolizing European borders One of the most immediate effects of rethinking Europe through the ­Caribbean is a drastic redrawing of European and EU borders. The first shift that occurs when considering Caribbean Europe an integral part of the EU concerns the latter’s external Western borders. The EU’s Western boundary has never been questioned in official discourse or constituted the object of accession negotiations (there was no “Western enlargement” of the EU). Very much unlike both the Eastern and the Southern boundaries, it is mostly considered unproblematic. Often conflated with the Western border of the European landmass, it is seen as beginning with the Atlantic Ocean on the Western coast of Portugal – although, in the case of the EU, this already leaves both the Spanish Canary Islands and Portuguese Azores and Madeira unaccounted for. When both these Atlantic colonies and ­Caribbean Europe are taken into account, however, the Western borders of the EU are suddenly relocated to the Americas – more precisely, to French Guiana in South America and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, which, as overseas regions of France, are integral parts of the French Republic and consequently of the EU. The shift also affects the external borders of the EU more generally: Through French Guiana, France borders Brazil and Suriname, while the Netherlands share a maritime border with Venezuela and the United States through the Lesser Antilles, which include the US Virgin Islands (see Figure 5.4).

Forgotten Europes  109 Accounting for Caribbean Europe impacts not only the EU’s external but also its internal borders. Since the territories of European member states in the Caribbean are differently positioned than on the European l­andmass, France only borders the Netherlands on the island of St. Martin/Sint Maarten and the Netherlands come to share maritime borders with France and the United Kingdom in the Caribbean Sea. If claiming that the westernmost point of the EU lies in the Caribbean or that France borders Brazil seems spectacular or extreme, this only goes to show the extent to which the coloniality of memory is ingrained in the public perception of Europe. From an official EU position, the above are uncontested formal borders. They however only surface in official discourse in times of crisis, or when they can sway political results in the metropole: French presidential candidates all campaigned in the Caribbean territories in the 2017 presidential elections, which earned Emmanuel Macron a significant share of the votes in an otherwise tight race (Le Monde, 2017); the United Kingdom was being unanimously accused of colonialism by Gibraltar, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands in 2018 when it attempted to legislate for its Overseas Territories on the issue of disclosing information on business owners (Bernews, 2018); while widespread destruction in large parts of the non-independent Caribbean in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 prompted heated debates on the rights of small island territories with high GNI per capita to receive official development aid (The Guardian, 2017). Apart from the drastic formal corrections operated on the borders of the EU, this shift of perspective also impacts the conventional geographical understanding of Europe as a coherent continent and the modern political norm of a US territory. If French, Spanish and Portuguese national territory spans Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean and South A ­ merica, then transcontinental states such as Turkey are no longer the exception to European geography, but the rule. When the Treaty on the EU states that “any European country may apply for membership if it respects the democratic values of the EU and is committed to promoting them” (European Commission, 2016); it, however, conflates both geographical and political criteria in the phrase “European country”. Yet not even geographical ­Europeanness makes sense as a criterion for EU accession. Most of the EU’s founding members did not meet it in 1957, when the European Economic Community was created and their overseas colonies were included, and some would still not meet it today. Here, too, the history and present-day reality of Caribbean Europe help shed light on the type of polity to which official or scholarly references to “European countries” implicitly or explicitly point. Accordingly, a map of Europe representing continental and non-­ continental European territories as a single space, locating Europe’s current Western borders in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea would look like the one featured in Figure 5.5.

Source: Isabel Röder, University of Freiburg.

Figure 5.5  Europe with current Western borders in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean.

Forgotten Europes  111 Creolizing European statehood The notion of “European country” invoked in the language of the European Commission is based on the sovereign nation-state that emerged with the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century and was consolidated in the aftermath of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. For a long time, mainstream historiography and social science viewed the rise of nation-states as the gradual overcoming of multinational political organizations and multiethnic empires throughout the world. The resulting conceptualization of empires and nation-states as mutually exclusive and chronologically discrete political formations and of the nation-state as the modern norm generated its own anomalies. The existence of the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Tsarist Empire well into the twentieth century had to be explained away accordingly as survivals of the old order, “anachronistic holdovers from an age of aristocracy, clinging to their imperial identifications in the face of the inevitable national challenges that mounted over the course of the nineteenth century” (Cooper, 2005: 156). In spite of ample evidence for the coexistence of imperial and national state structures in the nineteenth century and most of the ­twentieth century, the dominant view is that they no longer coexist in the ­twenty-first century. What Sylvia Walby (2003) has appropriately called “the myth of the nation-state” is both firmly anchored in the prevailing understanding of modern statehood and has continued to generated related myths. State formations which, as the European and US Caribbean territories, are still colonized in the twenty-first century, continue to be viewed as exceptions from the above trajectory from empire to nation and as anomalies in a modern world of sovereign nation-states. A growing literature tries to capture the paradoxical logic behind the functioning of state structures in the non-­ independent Caribbean using concepts such as “extended statehood” (Jong and Kruijt, 2005), “postcolonial sovereignty games” (Adler-Nissen and Gad, 2013), “the myth of sovereignty” (Lewis, 2013) or “non-sovereign futures” (Bonilla, 2015). The same ambiguous status with regard to these territories’ populations is echoed in Françoise Vergès’ notion that, for the inhabitants of France’s overseas possessions, French Republican principles of citizenship, equality and fraternity are “inflected: citizens but colonized, equal but not completely, brothers – but junior brothers” (Vergès, 2005: 75, my translation). Even a radically critical view of empire in the European context manages to once again forget (or not consider) Caribbean Europe in the endeavour of characterizing present-day state structures and to conclude that “the most important fact about empires is that they are gone” (Cooper, 2005: 203). Thus, Frederick Cooper’s detailed analysis of the transformations undergone by the French state in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era convincingly argues that France remained an empire-state for most of its modern history. Despite viewing the French overseas departments in the ­Caribbean as decisive for this argument, and a rethinking of France from its colonial borders as necessary, Cooper chooses Algeria’s

112  Manuela Boatcă independence as the moment that marked France’s transition from empire to nation-state, stating that, If one wants to rethink France from its colonies, one might argue that France only became a nation-state in 1962, when it gave up its attempt to keep Algeria French and tried for a time to define itself as a singular citizenry in a single territory. (Cooper, 2005: 22) When taking the French outermost regions into account, however, the very definition of “empire” Cooper provides a more apt characterization of post-1962 France than any available definition of a unitary nation-state, for which France has been seen as paradigmatic. Cooper defines empire as “a political unit that is large, expansionist (or with memories of an expansionist past), and which reproduces differentiation and inequality among people it incorporates” (Cooper, 2005: 27). What is therefore important in the context of Caribbean Europe in the twenty-first century is that its history and present as integral parts of European states and supra-state organizations such as the EU or the British Commonwealth of Nations effectively ­creolize the norm of the sovereign nation-state. The non-independent Caribbean encompasses multiple political forms and overlapping zones of affiliation that fall outside of the legal definition of either independent states or formal colonies (categorized here as “Caribbean Europe”) but also a large number of non-sovereign enclaves: military bases, privately owned islands, semiautonomous tourist resorts, free-trade zones, tax havens, wildlife preserves, satellite launching stations, detention centers, penal colonies, floating data centers, and other spaces of suspended, subcontracted, usurped, or imposed foreign jurisdiction that challenge the principles of bounded territorial authority associated with the Westphalian order. (Bonilla, 2015: 10) Thus, when the norm itself becomes questionable, it is not the non-­sovereign, non-emancipated or non-decolonized state structure that is in need of explanation, but the universality of the nation-state norm as well as the continuities of distinct formations to which it gave rise under colonial and imperial rule.

Crisis as a magnifying lens Regional entanglements that have been structurally invisibilized for several centuries, as in the case of Europe’s entanglements with its colonial possessions, suddenly acquire visibility in times of political, economic or ecological crisis. The aftermath of the devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean in 2017 has brought to the fore the ambivalent colonial status of Puerto Rico in

Forgotten Europes  113 relation to the United States and of French, British and Dutch outermost regions and overseas countries in relation to the EU. Repeated labour strikes in the French overseas departments throughout the 2000s, which have triggered the temporary shutdown of the European satellite launching station in French Guiana, have rekindled debates about the sovereignty of French Caribbean possessions in the face of mounting inequalities in the region. In most cases, the worldwide attention thus commanded is short-lived and does not lead to a systematic reconsideration of the mechanisms of invisibilization, or a questioning of the logic of the coloniality of memory underlying these territories’ lack of geopolitical visibility. Through the category of forgotten Europes, the perspective delineated here has intended to show that the becoming theory of the minor, that is, thinking from coloniality, offers a way out of periodically producing anomalies to a singular European norm. Thus, instead of explaining away those forgotten Europes that surface in times of crisis or relegating them to the status of exceptions, I suggest that crises should be used as a magnifying lens for exposing ongoing colonial entanglements. A telling recent illustration is offered by the Brexit negotiations, a ­European crisis for which the issue of borders is of central importance. Both EU level and media discussions of Brexit-imposed borders have revolved around the problems posed by the Irish border as well as by Gibraltar. Both can reasonably be considered colonial borders that have only become highly visible since their ambivalent post-Brexit status is threatening to create immigration, customs and trade chaos. The overwhelming vote to remain in the EU (96% in Gibraltar and 56% in Northern Ireland) was outweighed by the leave vote. At the same time, British Overseas Territories were not given a vote and their impeding hard borders have not yet been the object of Brexit negotiations, despite their representatives’ repeated plea that they should be. Anguilla, a British territory since 1650, borders France as well as the ­Netherlands through its own English Channel in the Caribbean  – the Anguilla channel – and is dependent upon both for trade and transportation: planes bound to Anguilla can only land on the Dutch island of Sint Maarten, while the only cargo port, through which Anguilla receives most goods, is located in the French part of the island, St. Martin (see Figure 5.6). The EU is the island’s only source of significant development aid and is currently funding reconstruction projects after Hurricane Irma. Yet this funding would be cut-off after Brexit while Anguilla’s citizens would lose both EU citizenship and unencumbered access to medical care, postal services and international travel for which they would need to pass the EU border into the neighbouring island. Tellingly, the Government of Anguilla has issued a report signalling the urgency and importance of these issues, titled “Anguilla & Brexit. ­Britain’s forgotten EU border” (Government of Anguilla London Office, 2017). Similar issues are being tentatively discussed with regard to other remote territories affected by Brexit. Forgotten Europes such as ­Anguilla and their corresponding forgotten borders might well be the magnifying glass needed in order to make the current implications of ­Europe’s long-standing colonial entanglements both visible and legible.

114  Manuela Boatcă

Figure 5.6  A nguilla’s European borders. Source: Wikimedia commons, public domain, available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:SSS_Islands_Map.png.

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Forgotten Europes  115 Bernews (2018) “Overseas Territories Accuse UK of Colonialism.” [On line. Available at: http://bernews.com/2018/05/overseas-territories-accuse-uk-colonialism/. Accessed on: 30 September 2018]. Boatcă, Manuela (2010) “Multiple Europes and the Politics of Difference Within.” In H. Brunkhorst and G. Grözinger (eds.) The Study of Europe. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 51–66. Boatcă, Manuela (2013) “Multiple Europes and the Politics of Difference Within.” Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise (Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University), vol. 3, no. 3. Boatcă, Manuela (2014) “Inequalities Unbound. Transregional Entanglements and the Creolization of Europe.” In S. Broeck and C. Junker (eds.) Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures. Frankfurt and New York: ­Campus, 211–230. Boatcă, Manuela (2015) Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism. Farnham: ­Ashgate Publishing. Boatcă, Manuela (2017) “The Centrality of Race to Inequality in the World-­System.” Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 23, no. 2, 1–8. Bonilla, Yarimar (2015) Non-sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Böröcz, Jozsef, and Sarkar, Mahua (2005) “What is the EU.” International ­Sociology, vol. 20, no. 2, 153–173. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and ­Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Connell, Raewyn (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cooper, Frederick (2005) Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dependencies and Territories of the World (2016) “Dependencies and Territories of the World.” [On line. Available at: www.worldatlas.com/dependtr.htm. Accessed on: 10 May 2018]. Éduscol (2011) Année des Outre-Mers Français. Enseigner l’Outre-Mer, enseigner en Outre-Mer. [On line. Available at: http://eduscol.education.fr/cid57163/2011-­ annee-des-outre-mer-francais.html. Accessed on: 10 March 2017]. European Central Bank (2017) Eurosystem. Design elements. [On line. Available at: www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/design/html/index.en.html. Accessed on: 18 November 2018]. European Commission (2016) European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations. Conditions for Membership. [On line. Available at: https://ec.europa. eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/conditions-membership_en. Accessed on: 18 March 2017]. EEAS (2016) European Union External Action. Overseas Countries and Territories. [On line. Available at: https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-home page/343/overseas-countries-and-territories_en. Accessed on: 13 March 2017]. European Parliament (2016) Fact Sheets on the European Union. Outermost Regions (ORs). [On line. Available at: www.europarl.europa.eu/atyourservice/en/display Ftu.html?ftuId=FTU_5.1.7.html. Accessed on: 13 March 2017]. Government of Anguilla London Office (2017) Anguilla & Brexit. Britain’s Forgotten EU Border. [On line. Available at: https://westindiacommittee.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/06/The-White-Paper-on-Anguilla-and-Brexit-1.pdf. Accessed on: 23 November 2018].

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116  Manuela Boatcă Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación; Boatcă, Manuela, and Costa, Sérgio (2016) Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart (2006 [1992]) “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In R. C. A. Maaka and C. Anderson (eds.) The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 165–173. Hansen, Peo, and Jonsson, Stefan (2014) Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Hine, Darlene Clark; Keaton, Trica Danielle, and Small, Stephen (eds.) (2009) Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Jong, Lammert de, and Kruijt, Dirk (2005) Extended Statehood in the Caribbean: Paradoxes of Quasi Colonialism, Local Autonomy, and Extended Statehood in the USA, French, Dutch, and British Caribbean. Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers. Le Monde (2017) “Présidentielle: la carte des résultats du second tour, commune par commune.” [On line. Available at: www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/ 2017/05/08/presidentielle-la-carte-des-resultats-du-second-tour-commune­par-commune_5124025_4355770.html. Accessed on: 30 September 2018]. Lewis, Linden (2013) Caribbean Sovereignty, Development and Democracy in an Age of Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Lewis, Martin W., and Wigen, Kären (1997) The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shih, Shu-mei (eds.) (2011) The Creolization of Theory. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Muller, Karis (2000) “‘Concentric Circles’ at the Periphery of the European Union.” Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 46, no. 3, 322–335. Muller, Karis (2001) “Shadows of Empire in the European Union.” The European Legacy, vol. 6, no. 4, 439–451. Raphael-Hernandez, Heike (2004) Blackening Europe: The African American Experience. New York: Routledge The Guardian (2017) “Our Hurricane-hit Islands Deserve Aid. The Rules that Block it are Wrong.” [On line. Available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/ sep/19/hurricane-maria-caribbean-oecd-aid-rules-assistance. Accessed on: 30 ­September 2018]. Todorova, Maria (1997) Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press Vergès, Françoise (2005) “L’Outre-Mer, une survivance de l’utopie coloniale républicaine?” In P. Blanchard, N. Bancel and S. Lemaire (dirs.) La fracture coloniale. Paris: La Découverte, 67–75. Vergès, Françoise (2015) “Creolization and Resistance.” In E. Gutiérrez Rodríguez and S. A. Tate (eds.) Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 38–56. Walby, Sylvia (2003) “The Myth of the Nation-state: Theorizing Society and Polities in a Global Era.” Sociology, vol. 37, no. 3, 529–546. Walsh, Catherine; Schiwy, Fred, and Castro-Gómez, Santiago (eds.) (2002) Indisciplinar las ciencias sociales: Geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder. Perspectivas desde lo andino. Qito: Editorial Abya Yala.

6 Geopolitical narratives of an “accommodating” state in the face of “low geopolitics” The Marca España and attracting Multilatina investment1 Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda Introduction The narratives of the state have been changing in the context of the recent economic crisis, and new “national” imaginaries have been created to compensate for the negative ratings of credit-rating agencies (country risk) and also for the sharp drop in economic activity in national territories. Global integration is in most cases the recovery scenario, where it is necessary to compete under the best possible conditions in the face of the “national” market crisis. Thus, in order to maintain the most profitable value generation spaces, the geopolitical scene keeps trying to “reimagine” itself to privilege –with state policy – the advance of certain actors over the most profitable economic areas and to favour the projection of any given ­country –and its companies – in the international economy sphere. In this scenario, policies to foster internationalization – including “­Country Brands” – have been promoted throughout Europe, Latin A ­ merica, ­Africa and Asia (Browning and Ferraz de Oliveira, 2017) over the last ten years as a means to improve the image of a country and thus attract investment and tourists and to generate greater economic activity both within the national territory and beyond the borders of the state. These processes have been interpreted by authors like Dicken (2010) and Svitych (2013) as symptoms of a potential post-globalization phase in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, a phase in which the states would again assume a “nationalist” and “competitive nation state status” versus more global or pro-transnational approaches. Other authors, for their part, see that states are gradually privatizing and subordinating themselves, and committing public resources in order to create ­contexts more favourable to private interests (Rose and Miller, 2010). ­However, it could be also studied as attempts to create asymmetrical p ­ ositions inside interregional relations. In that sense, while states promote interregionalism, states also compete to obtain a better position inside the interregional relations, particularly under economic crisis and through the establishment of strategic alliances with private and multinational actors.

118  Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda With a view to reflecting on the state-market relationship in contexts of crisis and on the production of discourses and actions which naturalize the dual relationship between state and national businesses, this text will attempt to (a) reflect upon the influence of the “economic and financial security” geopolitical scene designed by risk-rating agencies on state ­decision-making, (b) contextualize the role of the states in contexts of crisis and (c) explore a specific case of support to internationalization and the creation of a country brand, namely that of Spain, which has clearly projected itself to the Latin American region. In terms of the methodology used to carry out this analysis, this article builds on both a situation analysis and the textual analysis of documents. In the case of situation data, we will particularly focus on that referring to risk ratings issued by credit-rating agencies, the so called “country risk”, and the reactions they cause. With regard to discourse analysis, we analysed official documents, issued both by the state government and its public bodies, and those produced by business and academic sectors aligned with the policy of internationalization. The textual analysis of the documents will be approached through Cultural Political Economy2 to show the selection of strategies and discourses which shape the institutional design of the public policies implemented by states in a context of crisis.

Crisis, private agents and an accommodating state The oil crisis had consequences such as the critical level of debt in the semi-peripheral regions – especially Latin America – as well as serious consequences for the European and American banking systems. At that point, a need became apparent to assess the international risks of banks and private and public credit agencies with more criteria, especially when it came to financing both multilateral and private investment projects in emerging regions. “The concept of country risk has been gaining added importance since then” (Iranzo, 2008: 2).3 The effects of risks analysis and ratings to warn and advice investors were used by multilateral and private funding bodies to condition the carrying out of structural reforms in the 1990s in exchange for taking the risks of investing, funding or insuring development projects in these emerging contexts. The outbreak of the economic and financial crisis in the United States in 2007, which quickly spread across European countries and with less impact through other peripheral contexts, marked the return of the primacy of risk assessment and its influence on the geopolitical dynamics. Two elements characterized this new primacy: the scenario object of study and analysis is increasingly global, it is no longer solely the “emerging” countries4 that have to be subject of “rating”, and further to that, more and more credit-­ rating agencies are private transnational actors and investors with their own financial interests.

Geopolitical narratives in the face of ‘low geopolitics’  119 These actors, known as credit-rating agencies – Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Moody’s and Fitch – both rate states’ debt and analyse the risk premium on sovereign debt,5 which allows them to organize, rate and direct global financial investment in an “unbiased” way based on the analysis of the information from each country. Agnew defines these practices as “low geopolitics” of global order (2012: 172) as the future of private and public foreign investment depends upon them. These agencies “rate” the risk of investing in these countries, both in terms of foreign direct investment and buying public debt. Therefore, according to Agnew (2012), these agencies represent a privatization of global economic authority and also a limitation on state sovereignty. In this regard, he is in line with other authors who have reflected on the gradual privatization of authority in the context of globalization (Schwarcz, 2002a, 2002b) or at least on a change in the logic of public-­ private relationship (Sassen, 2010). However, this is not a new process as through many previous international and regional crises the narrative of the country risk has been an element which has affected the identification of the possibilities of political action in the domestic sphere and the discrediting of elites, as market financing became more complicated. In this more recent case, it has also justified many of the promotion actions towards new markets and investment attraction, especially in those states whose “credibility” has ended up damaged. The difference, though, is that these credit-rating agencies have been expanding their geographical scope of action since the 1970s (Agnew, 2012: 173) in response to the demand from private investors and from the actors who request ratings. In this regard, from the time of the most recent crisis, “central” countries and companies now “request rating with a view to obtaining funds to finance infrastructure and other public projects” (­Agnew, 2012: 173), but mainly to be able to finance themselves in bond markets. Thus, after the crisis, terminology such as risk premium, sovereign risk or names like S&P’s, which were virtually unknown to citizens in the Euro zone, became the main tools with which to analyse the depth of the ­economic crisis in the southern European countries. From 2009 onwards, it seemed that the Euro-Latin American geo-­ economic tables were starting to turn. The Southern European countries, Greece, Ireland, Spain, and even Italy and France saw their ratings fall. In January, 2012, nine European countries had rating downgrades; both the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and France lost their triple A (AAA) rating, and Spain was one of the most damaged countries.6 In the face of complaints about the fact that the downgrading had taken place when reform plans were already under way, the credit-rating agency claimed, “massive downgrades are made because the economic and political measures agreed by the main European leaders are insufficient to deal with the systemic tensions Europe is facing” (Pérez, 2012). In this critical scenario in which a private actor was conditioning ­European policy, the possibility of creating a “European” credit-rating agency so as to

120  Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda reduce the influence of American agencies was mooted, though this never materialized.7 However, although agencies were identified as “American” in the European imaginary, in August 2011, for the first time in history, S&P had downgraded the US economy, which had so far always been triple A (AAA). The global hegemonic power was symbolically losing its absolute financial primacy. Indeed, Obama’s criticism of this agency in relation to the low reliability of its analytical tools revealed how even the hegemonic global power had to defend its economy’s reputation and show the capacity of the state to support a questioned economy.8 This moment is in Agnew’s view a symptom of the gradual disassociation of these agencies from the states which fuelled and supported them as reference points and barometers, in other words, of their consolidation as private and autonomous authorities (2012: 179). This point is in line with Sassen’s approach when she notes that “there is little disagreement concerning the overall growth of private authority since the 1980s” (2010: 262), but more interestingly, it presents itself in different dynamics, the first is the proliferation of private agents who originate rules and norms to handle domains once exclusive to governments. The second is the marketizing of public functions both at the domestic and international levels. The third is the growing weight of private agents in internationalizing political authority. (idem., 263) She also points out the existence of two or more versions of authority privatization, including, “the circulation of private norms and aims through the public domain national states where they get represented as ‘public’ when in fact they are private” (idem.). In this context of this increasing weight of private authority, in Agnew’s view, “the political should no longer be seen as derived solely from states and societies defined as nation states” (2012: 179). Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the way in which the state establishes a relationship with the increasing consolidation of private authority and with the need to deal with the crisis of the economic and social system. The creation of Country Brands and the programmes to promote internationalization are without a doubt timely responses, but strategic solutions that would allow us to analyse these reimagination processes in relation to private actors given that states “commodify themselves” through these actions; they become a Brand with the support of and in alliance with private actors. That is, they commit to the objective of being an asset to make a profit for companies and compete in better conditions, and at the same time, attract private capital investment to their territories. In other words, the role of the state would be to provide the conditions for the development of the most competitive agents and business efficiency, what we call here an “accommodating” state. This is not a new function as

Geopolitical narratives in the face of ‘low geopolitics’  121 in the view of many authors a corporate and Schumpeterian (Jessop, 1993, 2000) state, competitive (Cerny, 1997, 2010) and globalization assembling (Glassman, 1999; Sassen, 2010) have been in place since the Fordism crisis. The difference in the current context of crisis would be a deepening of the conditional nature of the geopolitical scene as run by private agents and the strategies chosen by states within a competitive and accommodating logic.

Discourse strategies and a new economic imaginary in Spain: reversing the intangibles of “national” reputation and its projection in Latin America Jessop (2008) finds it important to analyse the way the state is capable of creating a discourse framework which legitimates a “general economic interest” and favours certain interests, identities and space-time horizons and simultaneously marginalizes others. Following cultural political economy, a crisis gives rise to institutional innovations tending to reorganize the whole social formation, the constitution of a new economic imaginary being one of the essential aspects (Sum and Jessop, 2013; Sum, 2015). As these authors see it, different narratives selectively emerge in the face of alternative visions in order to shape the state’s economic strategies and projects, setting hegemonic visions in different scales of action. Thus, the nature and outreach of the new action frameworks is defined from the local sphere all the way to the supra-national scale. It is worth noting that in some economies in the most “developed” countries, the 2008 crisis context gave rise to discourse strategies aiming at strengthening the internationalization and supra-national economic engagement policies. Countries such as Spain started to expand their mechanisms of competitive international integration by creating institutional instruments based on arrangements and incentive mechanisms coordinated beneath discourse strategies typical of a competitive, “commodifying” and accommodating state. These organizational-institutional arrangements (rules, laws, ­measures, etc.) and the narratives to cope with the crisis need to be related to the predominant structural moment and the situational particularities of these process and its specificities. Without a doubt, the structural moment in the case of Spain was clearly related to the downgrading issued by the ­credit-rating agencies, an exponential rise of the risk premium and the collapse of the real state bubble. We will now analyse the structural pressures and the selection of institutional strategies and arrangements. Throughout 2012, one of the worst years in terms of the media impact of the economic crisis in Spain, with the risk premium at 500, the fall of the “bull” was iconographically represented in the international press (Morán, 2013). Some analysts spoke of the burden that this image disseminated in the international context implied for business people, “in the case of Spain, everything suggests that the country risk index is a burden for businesses

122  Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda in relation to their relationship to capital markets”, and more specifically “the Argentine government (Repsol expropriation) would not have made the same decisions three years ago” (Llorente y Cuenca, 2012: 3) and therefore, “the current reputation of Spain is notably affecting the competitive capacity of the ‘Spanish business machine’” (Llorente y Cuenca, 2012: 9). In the face of these analyses carried out by private and business actors, a project that had emerged in the early 2000s9 was gradually brought back with great political will with the idea of working for the “image” of Spain, as if it were a company “brand”. This state project aimed at leading the improvement of the image of Spain as a brand in order to create security and attract foreign investment, but especially to accompany the internationalization efforts of Spanish companies. The Socialist Party (2004–2011) administration had made efforts to improve the internationalization of the economy in the context of the crisis. However, it was when the Popular Party came to power in November 2011 that the project of creating a Country Brand was brought back while structural adjustment and reduction of public spending laws were passed. Thus, in 2012, the “need” to create a Marca España started to be designated as a “state policy”. To this aim was created the new Alto Comisionado del Gobierno para la Marca España [Government High Officer for the Marca España] whose mission was to improve the image of Spain, modelled on the initiatives adopted by other states to create the country brand concept and in second place, to promote the coordinated action of all those institutions and entities committed to initiatives that aid in the improving of results and achieve measurable contributions for the interests of Spain in the economic, cultural, social, scientific and technological spheres.10 As is generally the case in the processes of creation of Country Brands, especially in Latin America, one of the functions entrusted to the High Commissioner was the creation of coordinated actors through public-private collaboration in relation to the objectives proposed. Thus, the Observatorio Imagen de España [Observatory on the Image of Spain] was created, led by the Elcano Royal Institute, a public-private foundation which had been creating and promoting reports and recommendations since 2008 from the Observatorio Permanente de la Imagen Exterior de España en la Prensa ­Internacional (OPIEX) [Permanent Observatory of Spain’s External Image in the International Press]. Further to that, the Foro de Marcas Renombradas Españolas [Leading Brands of Spain Forum] was recognized as the “interlocutor and preferred partner” of the Marca España project. According to their own website, this Forum is a “public-private strategic alliance of the main Spanish companies with leading brands and international projection in their respective sectors and the competent government bodies”11 with regard to internationalization matters.

Geopolitical narratives in the face of ‘low geopolitics’  123 Furthermore, a series of private companies collaborate in the design and justification of those actions aiming at improving the reputation of Spain. The R&D department at Llorente y Cuenca, a communication and public affairs management consultancy, for example, wrote a Special Report in 2012, Diagnóstico sobre la revalorización de la Reputación de España, “to modestly contribute to restoring and revalue the reputation of Spain as a country” in order to regain the position that Spanish companies and organizations had until very recent times, and to make efforts so that the reputation of Spain as a nation is consistent with the foundations of its economy and with the value that its companies and financial institutions add to the international markets. (Llorente y Cuenca, 2012: 2) Based on the analysis of promotion material, video, texts and reports from the High Commissioner’s Office, the Leading Brands of Spain Forum, the Observatory of Spain’s External Image and the Elcano Royal Institute, all financial marketing and public diplomacy instruments in the Spanish case, we extracted these discourse elements which have created a new identification narrative of the interests of the state and the market. First, a distinction is established between Country Brand as a strategy developed as “mere” financial ­marketing – especially by developing countries – with the aim of exporting, attracting tourists and investment, and public or political diplomacy, which according to Noya and Prado (2012), is carried out by big and medium powers in order to increase their political influence on other countries and on the global agenda, the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and China being some of the actors in this field. In the context of the crisis, Spain relied on a joint strategy to coordinate these two work lines or strategies, and thus the document published by the Diplomatic School of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims that foreign action challenges include both Public Diplomacy and Country Brand. In relation to previous Country Brand experiences, the documents on the Spanish strategy highlight the efforts in successful campaigns since 2004: Prochile, 2005, Chile Sorprende, Finland 2008, A Mission for ­Finland, “without fear of challenges”, and those in Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, ­Colombia and Peru in 2010. Clearly, Latin American countries appear as models to be followed as they have been particularly successful at creating their country brands. Furthermore, this is a relational strategy given that the documents often highlight the existence of strategic scenarios that Spain “should” explore, such as Latin American countries highly attractive for investment, mainly Brazil and Argentina, and to a lesser extent Mexico, Peru and Colombia. The Marca España 2014 Annual Plan includes twenty countries for priority lines of action, which make “80% of the target market for Spanish exports and of borrowing and tourist attraction”, within these countries, only ­Brazil, the United States and Mexico would be priority in the Americas.12

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Spain: hub for multilatina companies Along with this concern for improving the image of Spain following the Country Brand model, in 2012 private consultants started to analyse global geo-economics in a different way. For instance, ESADE, the most important business school in Spain, claimed that “the world no longer has a Centre and a Periphery, nor North or South” because “the world has ceased to be focused on the OECD countries. The emerging countries (Latin ­A merica) are becoming increasingly important” (Santiso, 2012). In this context, a new scenario started to take shape in Spain; the discourses around Latin America point out that it can no longer be seen as a place of arrival for Spanish companies’ investment and services, but rather in terms of the potential of multilatina companies and the opportunity for them to establish themselves in Spain as an intermediate country so that these financial and non-financial companies could invest in places such as Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This discourse was disseminated through different consulting companies and sustained a new imaginary around multilatina companies, which are seen as emerging multinational companies. Although they originally emerged in the 1970s, they re-emerged as from 2000 and progressively started to invest outside their region. Thus, attracting multilatina investment and becoming HQs of some of them turned into a highly inviting prospect in the context of the crisis. The discourses favouring this objective started to emerge in order to show a geopolitical narrative of pursuing a new relationship with Latin America, as seen in Santiso, “the multilatina companies boom is an  opportunity for Spain, which needs to (re)think its relationship with Latin America” (2012), and thus this relationship is no longer “uni-directional but rather bi-directional: now it is our turn to welcome multilatina companies with open arms” (Urdiales, 2014). Furthermore, and along the lines of the Country Brand concept, the value of Spain’s geo-strategic position as hub or multimodal bridge between different markets was highlighted, inasmuch as Spain’s position provides access to the European Union market, its geographical access is highly favourable and it is a leader country both in the Mediterranean region and in Latin America (García de Quevedo, 2018). Finally, the Spanish state is committed to these approaches, which strengthens the function of “accommodating” state by highlighting its new role as a “real partner connecting different actors and giving the necessary support to put private sector initiatives into practice” (Marca España, 2014). To this aim, “Spain needs to position itself as an international business and investment platform to access, EU, EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), Latin American and African markets” (Marca España, 2014). Years later, in 2017, another executive document issued by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Turism pointed out the importance of attracting multilatina companies to Spain. It lays out a favourable scenario in terms of infrastructure and tax and legal advantages for the establishment of foreign companies in Spanish territory. Thus, among other selective strategies, this

Geopolitical narratives in the face of ‘low geopolitics’  125 document shows the way legal and tax regulations have been developed to attract investment, especially from multilatina companies.13 It highlights, for instance, Law 14/13, a support law for entrepreneurs and their internationalization which presents a new legal framework to promote foreign investment in Spain, and Law 25/2015 de Mecanismo de Segunda Oportunidad [Second Opportunity Mechanism Law], in force as from 30 July 2015 (Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo, 2017). Furthermore, in the case of Spain, business relationships with Latin America are favoured by an extensive network of both Convenios de Doble Imposición (CDIs) [­Double Taxation Agreements] and Acuerdos para la Promoción y Protección de ­Inversiones (APPRIs) [Agreement for Investment Promotion and Protection] (Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo, 2017).

Conclusions The use of the political cultural economy framework of analysis has revealed how the structural pressures that Spain and other mainly southern European countries suffered conditioned these states’ intervention to deal with low ­volumes of investment and the slowdown of the economy. Private agencies gave a negative rating to the financing possibilities in the “central” states markets, and this downgrading placed the European region on the same level of insecurity and stigmatization that peripheral countries had suffered in other times. In this context where the geopolitical downgrading led by private agents sketched a new world scenario, other private agents in Spain – consultants, private universities and investment advisers – started to reimagine and disseminate a new narrative in terms of the position of Spain in Latin A ­ merica and vice versa. These new narratives aimed at presenting two strategies that were later taken up by the High Commissioner for the Marca España, ­government agencies such as the ICEX and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These new narratives were first instrumentalized by attempts to improve and reverse the reputation of Spain through the Country Brand, and then by designing a new “place” as home and bridge to multilatina companies. The technologies used included a combination of regulations, plans and projects led by public-private partnership. We believe, therefore, that although the state, and especially European states, could have modified the space occupied by private agents (Jessop, 2012) and mainly by credit-rating agencies in the context of the crisis, they eventually opted for competition as a way out of the crisis, the global scenario becoming once again the locus to drive internationalization and attract foreign investment. The only change is probably the relation of mutual necessity currently existing between Spanish and Latin American private agents. This, in turn, naturalizes the common destiny of these two regions. Therefore, state maintain this two increasingly imbricated strategies: on the one hand creating better conditions for transnationalism leaded by private think tanks and multinational actors, and on the other hand, getting a better position to support and lead interregionalism among UE and Latin America.

126  Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda

Notes 1 This article was translated by Gerard Mc Donagh thanks to the support of the Faculty of Sociology and Political Science, at Complutense University of Madrid. 2 The Cultural Political Economy approach – mainly developed by Sum and Jessop (2013) – analyses the mechanisms which define the co-evolution of the semiotic and extra-semiotic aspects of economic policy. 3 However, the origin of the country risk concept predates this moment country risk assessment started at the beginning of the 20th Century following a private initiative related to the issuing of reports on railway companies that issued bonds in the USA. Poor’s Publishing Co. and Standard Statistics Bureau were established years later. (Gorfinkiel and Lapitz, 2005: 2) 4 In Latin America, there was a general perception that for the first time ­Europe was in crisis and this new scenario was apparent in different ways. For instance, Dilma Rousseff, when on an official trip and in a press conference with ­European authorities in the framework of the Brazil-EU Summit, stated “the EU ‘can count on’ Brazil to emerge from the crisis, and explained to Europeans that ‘from our own experience’, an increase in austerity measures results in higher unemployment and social inequality” (“Brasil ofrece ayuda a la UE para salir de la Crisis.” El País (Montevideo, Uruguay), 4 October 2011 [On line. Available at: http://historico.elpais.com.uy/111004/ultmo-597497/ultimomomento/brasil-ofrece-ayuda-a-la-ue-para-salir-de-la-crisis/. Accessed on: 20 June 2018]). 5 A financial analysis agency defines these terms in the following way, debt rating measures the capacity of a country, government or company to deal with debt and therefore, its investment risk. The higher the risk, the worse its rating due to the probability of non-payment. The risk premium, country risk or sovereign risk is defined as the premium paid by a country to finance itself in the markets when compared to another country. Germany is the country of reference in the Euro zone and a country’s risk premium is the difference between its 10-year bond and the German 10-year bond (bund). (See web page of DATOS MACRO. Available at: https://datosmacro.expansion.com/ratings. Accessed on 11 November 2018) Furthermore, the ‘sovereign risk’ is the risk of default of Sates or of entities guaranteed by them. Non-payment of the sovereign debt can be caused by lack of public revenue, by lack or shortfalls of foreign exchange, or by a government’s lack of willingness to pay due to diverse political factors. (Iranzo, 2008) 6 This change in the geo-economic scenario was described as extraordinary in the press, At a moment when the risk premium is reaching all-time highs in Spain, investors are looking for options in other economies offering higher security and profitability. Latin America seems to be the preferred destination of Spanish companies, which see this region as a set of countries with emerging economies and ideal political stability for investment. With a few specific

Geopolitical narratives in the face of ‘low geopolitics’  127 exceptions, the Latin American region is set to become the global leader for its capacity to attract foreign investment. (“Colombia ofrece la prima de riesgo más baja de América Latina.” El Mundo Financiero, 21 Octobre 2014. [On line. Available at: www.elmundofinanciero.com/noticia/3032/Exterior/ Colombia-ofrece-la-prima-de-riesgo-mas-baja-deAmerica-Latina.html. Accessed on: 20 June 2018] 7 Attempts to construct alternative indices such as the one for Mesoamerican countries (Buonomo, 2010) are also worth noting. 8 In terms of this decision, the president’s criticism focused on the way these agencies included doubts on political decisions in their ratings, like, for example, including or not including the ceiling for public expenditure, rather than focusing on economic strength. As Obama stated on August 2011, “Standard & Poor’s casts doubt on our political system, not on our capacity for debt payment” and claimed that “the USA has always been and always will be an AAA country” (“Obama asume que la rebaja de la calificación de Standard and Poor´s es una crítica a los partidos.” La Vanguardia, 8 August 2011 [On line. Available at: www.lavanguardia.com/internacional/20110808/54196971656/obama-asumeque-la-rebaja-de-la-calificacion-de-standard-poor-s-es-una-critica-a-lospartidos.html. Accessed on: 21 June 2018]). 9 The Real Instituto Elcano [Elcano Royal Institute] was created as a private foundation in 2001, though it actually started activities in 2002, and although its statutes highlight the fact that it is an autonomous institution independent from the public administration, its Trust is clearly public-private and the same goes for its funding (75% private and 25% public); the Board of Trustees is composed of the presidents of the companies that joined the project, and the former presidents of the government Felipe González, José María Aznar and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Defence, Economy and Competitiveness, Education, Culture and Sports. The Board of Trustees has one trustee nominated by the leading opposition party. (Elcano’s web page. Available at: http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/ wps/portal/rielcano_es/sobre-elcano/patronato. Accessed on 17 September 2018). This think tank progressively focuses its work documents and situation analysis on the problem of the “reality of the situation in Spain” and its “negative and unfair” image abroad. 10 Real Decreto [Royal Decree] 998/2012, 28 June 2012 (Boletín Oficial del Estado, no. 155, 29 June 2012, 46129–46132 [On line. Available at: www.boe.es/boe/ dias/2012/06/29/pdfs/BOE-A-2012-8672.pdf. Accessed on: 12 October 2018]. 11 More than hundred companies are part of this forum, three ministries and two government agencies (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Ministry of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda, the Institute of Foreign Trade and the Spanish Office of Patents and Brands). 12 “The so called Planes Integrales de Desarrollo de Mercado (PIDM) are operative since 2005; they have been gradually improved and expanded on in recent years, and today these plans are in force in 16 countries or regions: Algeria, ­Australia, Brazil, China, the countries members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, South Korea, USA, India, Indonesia, Japan, Morocco, Mexico, Russia, ­Singapore, South Africa and Turkey. These plans have a dual main objective: to

128  Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda take advantage of new opportunities in the international economy and to geographically diversify the Spanish foreign sector, highly concentrated in the EU” (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, 2014: 30). 13 These advantages can be analysed in depth on the Invest in Spain website: www. investinspain.org/invest/es/index.html. Accessed on 12 September 2018.

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Geopolitical narratives in the face of ‘low geopolitics’  129 Llorente y Cuenca (2012) Diagnóstico y Recomendaciones sobre la revalorización de la Reputación de España. Informe Especial, Real Instituto Elcano. [On line. Available at: www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/wcm/connect/d5b570804e99eeb5bb4 aff6f092ec5a2/Llorente-Cuenca-Informe-Reputacion-Espana.pdf ?MOD= AJPERES&CACHEID=d5b570804e99eeb5bb4aff6f092ec5a2. Accessed on: 21 June 2018]. Marca España (2014) Plan Anual de Acción Exterior. Alto Comisionado para la Marca España. [On line. Available at: https://marcaespana.es/sites/default/files/ plan_anual_2014.pdf. Accessed on: 18 July 2018]. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (2014) Plan estratégico de internacionalización de la economía española 2014–2015. Madrid: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [On line. Available at: www.mineco.gob.es/stfls/mineco/comercio/ 140228_Plan_Internacionalizacion.pdf. Accessed on: 12 January 2018]. Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo (2017) España, plataforma para las inversiones y sedes de empresas multilatinas en Europa, África y Oriente Medio. [On line. Available at: www.investinspain.org/invest/wcm/idc/groups/public/ documents/documento/mde0/mzqy/~edisp/doc2014342090.pdf. Accessed on: 23 June 2018]. Morán, María (2013) Toro flaco … La imagen del toro como símbolo de la crisis de España en los medios internacionales. Real Instituto Elcano, Observatorio Imagen de España, Estudios – Análisis Iconográfico, no. OIE 9/2013. [On line 27 February 2013. Available at: www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/wcm/connect/e16ab0004e b57268a719ef b5284b5e68/OME9-2013-Moran-imagen-toro-Espana-medioscrisis.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=e16ab0004eb57268a719efb5284b5e68. Accessed on: 7 January 2018]. Noya, Javier and Prado, Fernando (2012) Marcas-país: éxitos y fracasos en la gestión de la imagen exterior. Documento de Trabajo no. 13/2012, Real Instituto Elcano [On line. Available at: www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/wcm/connect/723519804d 04736c8ed6cff2157e2fd8/DT13-2012_Noya-Prado_Marca-pais_exitos_fracasos_ gestion.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CACHEID=723519804d04736c8ed6cff2157e2fd8. Accessed on: 12 June 2018]. Pérez, María Jesús (2012) “¿Quién se esconde detrás de las agencias de rating?” ABC, 23 January 2012 [On line. Available at: www.abc.es/20120123/economia/­abci-agenciasrating-suplemento-empresa-201201231233.html. Accessed on: 20 June 2018]. Rose, Nikolas and Miller, Peter (2010) “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government.” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 61, no. 1, 271–303. Santiso, Javier (2012) La década de las multilatinas, una oportunidad para España. Presentación. [On line. Available at: http://itemsweb.esade.edu/research/esadegeo/ 2012MultilatinasLatibex_v20.pdf. Accessed on: 23 May 2018]. Sassen, Saskia (2010) Territorio, autoridad y derechos. Buenos Aires: Katz Editores. Schwarcz, Steven L. (2002a) “Private Ordering of Public Markets: The Rating Agency Paradox.” University Illinois Law Review, vol. 2002, no. 1, 1–28. Schwarcz, Steven L. (2002b) “Private Ordering.” Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 97, no.1, 319–350. Sum, Ngai-Ling (2015) “Cultural Political Economy of Competitiveness, Competition and Competition Policy in Asia.” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, vol. 16, no. 2, 211–228. Sum, Ngai-Ling and Jessop, Bob (2013) Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy. Camberley: Edward Elgar Publishing.

130  Rosa de la Fuente and Renato L. P. Miranda Svitych, Alexander (2013) “The End of Globalization and Renaissance of the ­Welfare State.” Global Minds, 4 December [On line. Available at: http://theglobal journal.net/article/view/1123/. Accessed on: 21 March 2017]. Urdiales, Gonzalo (2014) “Entrevista con Javier Santiso: ‘España debe ser el centro de decisión europeo de las multilatinas’.” El Economista América, 14 March 2014. [On line. Available at: www.eleconomistaamerica.com/empresas-eAm/ noticias/5621162/03/14/Javier-Santiso-Espana-debe-ser-el-centro-de-decisioneuropeo-de-las-multilatinas.html. Accessed on: 13 September 2018].

7 Beyond the “lettered border” Towards a comparative horizon in European and Latin American border studies Olivier Thomas Kramsch On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the ocean. They become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. (Conrad, 1947 [1904 1st ed.]: 5) La cuestión es que, desde la incomodidad que produce un cierto escepticismo hacia las divisiones regionales en particular, y hacia la Transitología en general, me parecía más imaginativo proponer, desde el mismo contexto de producción, una visión algo desenfocada, proyectada desde una minúscula incisión dentro de las miradas preferentes. (Lois, 2014: 240)1

A productive malaise This chapter begins with a productive sense of malaise, both personal and disciplinary. The affective state I refer to has its temporal origins in the decades of the 1990s and early 2000s when and from a diversity of locations – Oulu (Finland), Belfast (Ireland), Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and other sites – an attempt was made to generate a “b/ordering turn” within the extant field of boundary studies. Traditionally conceived as fixed “lines in the sand”, as physical, and quasi-natural features of the landscape existing in a static and atemporal condition, borders were suddenly reconceptualized as something more fluid and mobile, as an inherently social and socializing product, comprised of areas that, if they indeed marked and were expressive of socio-spatial differences, were at the same time susceptible to unpredictable dynamics, uncontrolled subjective perception and divergent symbolic as well as institutional interpretations, ultimately the result of a complex “social spatialization”, not without tension and contestation (Paasi, 1996, 2001; Newman and Paasi, 1998; Anderson and O’Dowd, 1999; Wastl-Walter, Varadi and Veider, 2002). An important geopolitical context undergirding the “b/ordering turn” in boundary studies was the recognition that, instead of producing a “world

132  Olivier Thomas Kramsch without borders”, globalization had contributed to a resurgence of territories and borders in all parts of the planet (Kolossov and O’Loughlin, 1998; Anderson, 2002; Newman, 2006). More than just reflecting a quantitative phenomenon, however, postmodern social theory would play a decisive role in the fin de siecle resignification of the traditional object of border studies (Newman, 1999). These links to social theory promised to open border studies to new vistas, freer from structuralist constraints and determinations emanating from the classical, modernist era. In B/ordering space (2005), Wolfgang Zierhofer, Henk van Houtum and I helped consolidate the “bordering turn”; by rendering borders as a verb, we deployed a social constructivist reading of borders that foregrounded the role of the imagination as a key component of the bordering dynamic and its attendant Us/Them relational binaries. But nearly a decade and a half on from B/ordering space, I argue we are stranded at a conceptual as well as political impasse, the resolution of which will require us to embark on new travel to as-yet-unknown destinations. My concern can best be captured in the following question: if bordering – defined principally as the creation of an Us and a Them – is a ceaseless process producing an reproducing difference in space, how to distinguish progressive and emancipatory elements in bordering practices from those that end in a politics of exclusion, marginalization, violence and death? The field of border studies – even in its most cosmopolitan variants – ­remains silent on the subject. It is as if the very posing of this question would threaten the very raison d’etre of the discipline. The normative vacillation in border studies becomes dangerous to the extent that the most cited and applauded texts reproduce the exclusionary, oppressive and deadly nature of contemporary geopolitical bordering, expressed most vividly by the European Union (EU)’s practice of migration policy in the Mediterranean. Here, what the Catalan geographer Xavier Ferrer-Gallardo and I have called the “spectacular borders” of the EU are made manifest in academic writing on the operations of European multilateral security organizations such as FRONTEX, whereby emphasis is placed on the thousands of deaths which have converted the Mare Nostrum into an aquatic cemetery (Ferrer-Gallardo and Kramsch, 2016). In spite of noble intentions and capacity for moral denunciation, such academic work, in addition to veering dangerously close to populist discourses on the rise across Europe, only serve to reinscribe geopolitical hierarchies between the EU and the rest of the world. At the end of the day, as disciplinary objects – in both senses of the word – borders here only have a regressive function, unable to propose a politics that transcend the incessant compartmentalization of the planet (see Chambers, 2012). As a result, border writing in/from ­Europe remains caught in a “labyrinth of (fear and) loneliness” at a moment when it can least afford it (Paz, 2015). Against this backdrop of danger – as

Beyond the “lettered border”  133 much for Europe as its surrounding neighbourhood – an open question imposes itself: what kind of borders do we produce through our thinking? And with what theoretical and political effects?

Taking the “road less travelled” In an article that appeared in the Anglo-saxon journal Geopolitics, the ­British geographer James Sidaway proposes two possible paths for the future of what he calls “critical border studies” (Sidaway, 2011): (1) to keep training attention on the “spectacular” borders of the EU (i.e. FRONTEX) so as to maintain the moral denunciation of the exclusionary practices of EU migration policy-making; (2) to analyse the “global” frontiers of civilizational and cultural interaction, where the lineaments of a shared and co-produced modernity may be apprehended between Europe and those ­regions of the world in which Europe has geo-historically intervened (­Africa, Asia, Latin A ­ merica). To be sure, the two proposed agendas are not mutually exclusive; but I claim that border studies’ predilection for the former has more to do with the imperatives of “spectacular” visibility and popularity among so-called “top” international (but mostly English language) scientific ­journals  – measured by bibliometrics such as International Scientific Indexing (ISI) – than in any well-grounded theoretical strategy. Ultimately, this path is closely connected not to conceptual developments internal to a particular field but rather to neoliberal practices governing contemporary academic knowledge production (see Paasi, 2011). But what if we took the “road less travelled”, and allow ourselves to think together the bordering of Europe according to the second model, as the co-production of a modernity that is not “European” but global? Regarding the relation between Europe and Latin America, this line of thought – grasped in its geo-historic plenitude – would invite us to consider Europe’s expanding “coloniality of power” in the New World, tracing the expansion and development of different European frontiers from their geo-historical origins, according to the different logics and modalities of governance associated with each European colonial metropolitan power (Spain, P ­ ortugal, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands), in their divergent contexts, ­including policies of racial pacification and the formation of local elites, with their diverse urban nuclei. In an effort that is equally genealogical as it is comparative, a point of reference in Latin American thought might be Angel ­Rama’s La Ciudad Letrada (1984).2 A comparative genealogy par excellence of Spanish urbanism in the Americas, in this classic text Rama presents Latin American urban development as the product of a dialectical and intergenerational struggle between, on the one hand, a written culture emanating from the Spanish courts and projected onto its colonial peripheries – after independence subsequently appropriated by local criollo elites – and, on the other, the oral cultures of subaltern classes located at the margins of established colonial power.

134  Olivier Thomas Kramsch In this context, I propose we could in similar fashion trace the origins and evolution of a “lettered border” – running parallel to the lettered city of Rama – beginning with the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) between the representatives of Isabel and Fernando, Kings of Castille and Aragón and those of King Juan II of Portugal, as a result of which the navigable zones of the Atlantic were demarcated, as well as strategies planned for the conquest of the New World. In the same way that the hieratic utopias of sacred European writing found themselves challenged as they penetrated into the rebellious urban spaces of the new continent canvassed by Rama, we could observe how the delirious cartographic visions embedded in the notorious Planisferio de Cantino (1502), designating the meridian of the Treaty of Tordesillas, enter almost immediately into difficulties in trying to establish the exact position of the line. This occurred because the treaty only specified the line of demarcation 370 leagues from the islands of Cape Verde, without either first having identified the line in Meridian degrees nor the island from which the leagues should have been measured, nor the longitude of a league; as if from a fable of Italo Calvino’s, the treaty declared that these issues would be resolved by a joint expedition that never took place. At each step in the development of the hispano-portuguese frontiers legitimized by Tordesillas, we could then determine the shifts and points of rupture, the unconscious border rendered by the aphorism “I act but do not obey”3 that would subvert every effort to apply straight cartographic lines from European centres onto its so-called ­colonial peripheries. In the end, those very centralized European powers did not obey the treaty: Portugal gradually advanced from Brazil towards the West of South America, and, in similar fashion Spain colonized the P ­ hilippines, which were located within Portugal’s sphere of influence. The historiographical and political-geographic treatment of the ­A mericas emanating from the Anglo-Saxon world has tended to pass over these confused origins of borders in the Americas, leaving us with a limpid centre-­ periphery model which has predominated until our present day. In this respect, the influence of the sociologist Edward Shils has been notable (1975); his work on the establishment of inter-social “centres” and “peripheries” has been foundational for historians as well as geographers of the E ­ uropean colonization of the Americas. The dense work of the North American ­geographer Donald Meinig is also an important reference point, permitting the observation of the contradictory and capillary processes of the frontier development of the continent into its most remote interstices (Meinig, 1986). Historian Jack P. Greene, for his part, confronting the spatial as well as economic determinism of Immanuel Wallerstein, proposed the influential argument that imperial power was not imposed by the Spanish metropolis but was “negotiated” in the Americas (Greene, 1994; see also Daniels and ­Kennedy, 2002). Greene’s thesis, questioning the unidirectional nature of power (i.e. centre-periphery, Europe-Latin America), recuperated the agency of local Latin American creole elites, and in this way preserved for a future moment “sideways perspectives” on the metropole-colony relation.

Beyond the “lettered border”  135 These rich historiographical and political-geographic works could nourish our comparative genealogical project, except for the fact that they only cover the classical period: most end in the decade of the 1840s; they focus only on the external frontiers of European colonization, and assume an ­ever-dwindling preponderance of “Europe” as an economic and territorial power as the nineteenth-century advances, until only the United States ­remains as a hegemonic power in the region. This, I argue, poses an unresolved problem in the study of the role of imperialism in Latin ­A merica. As Barbara Hooper and I asserted more than a decade ago (Hooper and Kramsch, 2007), a curious silence prevails today even among the anti-­ imperialist European Left in taking full responsibility for the European “colonial present” in the contemporary political imagination (see Gregory, 2010; Anderson, 2013). Some years ago now, early geographical critiques of this posture emerging from the margins of the Anglo-Saxon academy had placed their finger on the wound caused by the absence of debate on the contemporary coloniality of European power, in which, for Anglo-Saxon geographers Continental Europe only figured as a picturesque colonial past, to be studied in the literature of colonial travel writing, whereas imperial Realpolitik was situated exclusively in a hegemonic and all-powerful United States (Gregson, Simonsen and Vaiou, 2003). These academic practices, so Gregson and her colleagues – in a way similarly perceived long ago by Fanon (1967/1994) – only serve to mask the continued hegemony of Anglo-Saxon geography with respect to different continental European geographies, which are placed in the role of providing picturesque empirical case studies for consumption by the centres of the discipline: the United States and Great Britain. Countering this lacunae is precisely the challenge taken up recently by the field of “transatlantic post-colonial studies” in the Spanish language (Rodríguez and Martínez, 2010), as well as the critical geography of ­European borders (Ferrer-Gallardo, 2008; Kramsch, 2010, 2012a; Kuus, 2011; ­Bialasiewicz, 2012; Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias and Pickles, 2012; ­Espiñeira, 2013; Moisio et al., 2013). But whereas transatlantic post-­colonial studies would appear to embrace a post-national or even post-theoretical moment in the relation Europe-Latin America, I would like to embark on something more modest, which could be grasped in an observation that would remain to be explored in its empirical richness and theoretical-­ political consequences. This observation may start from the proposition that there was and continues to be a close relationship between bordering dynamics within and outside Europe; between the internal borders binding European member states and the ancient colonial frontiers, now state borders, belonging to the countries of the Latin American continent. We know from the many studies of European colonialism, such as those carried out by Fredric Cooper and Laura Ann Stoler (1997), in addition to historical analyses of imperial frontiers (Maier, 2006) and Edward W. Said’s strategies of “contrapuntal reading” (1993) that there has always existed a mutual

136  Olivier Thomas Kramsch influence between European metropoles and colonies which do not cease to resonate in our present time. In these readings of Europe’s “imagined geographies” (Said, 1993), European frontiers took on the role of “laboratories of modernity”, whose innovations were reimported into the imperial metropolizes, across a range of sectors, including health, educational reform and urban planning (Viswanathan, 1989; Wright, 1991). But the possibility of an inter-border, transatlantic rhythmanalysis would appear to be excluded from contemporary English-language border studies that compare “Europe” and “America” (Canada/EEUU/Mexico) (Scott, 1999; Brunet-Jailly, 2004). Whether in the form of NAFTA or the EU, each geopolitical context shines in splendid ideographic isolation. The dense linkages that once united and continue to weave these two macro-blocs remain hidden from view. In what follows I tap out the discursive geopolitical rhythms suturing two sets of interdependent Euro-Latin American borders, thereby triangulating two old European ex-colonial powers – Spain and Great Britain – and two post-colonial peripheries, Gibraltar and the ­Falkland Islands.

Chronicle of a border foretold: rock of Gibraltar/Falkland Islands On 12 August 2013, under the pretext that the authorities of Gibraltar had thrown blocs of cement into the sea and in this manner hindered the work of Andalusian fishermen in the area, the Spanish government announced a series of revindications before international agencies. A week later S ­ panish foreign minister Margallo prepared an alliance with Argentina so as to bring their claims collectively to the United Nations. The foreign ministry announced there could be a meeting between Margallo and his Argentine counterpart Hector Timerman, taking advantage of elections for the 2020 Olympics site, which would take place in Buenos Aires. In the face of the attempt by Spain to link the “decolonization” of Gibraltar with that of the Falkland Islands, the retort of the British foreign ministry is blunt: referring himself to that “great ally of Great Britain”, subsecretary Alistair Burt defended Gibraltar and her rights, ending his speech with the phrase “always judge friends by the company they keep” (cited in Gómez, 2013). The laconic words of subsecretary Burt, I suggest, re-inscribe an old geopolitical and imperial border, under whose rubric European metropolitan powers unite on the side of those who inhabit “civilized” borders, confronting together the “abyssal line” of an external, wild and gaucho-infested exterior (Santos, 2010). On a diplomatic level, the impact of such discursive bordering is immediate, to the extent that from then on minister Margallo ceases mentioning Gibraltar and the Falklands as comparable “residual colonial situations”. As a consequence of this diplomatic fracas, a spokesperson for the government of Gibraltar asserted that “regarding British public opinion, the cases

Beyond the “lettered border”  137 of Gibraltar and Falklands are not comparable. [In the Falklands] there was recently a war and British soldiers died there” (quoted in Gómez, 2013). In the face of this reply, we could well ask, “what geopolitical unconscious animates this alleged incomparability between Gibraltar and the Falkland ­Islands?” Towards the end of the 1990s, Benedict Anderson used the phrase “the demon of comparisons” (in original: “el demonio de las comparaciones”) to describe the experience of the young Philippine nationalist José Rizal, who compared the gardens of Manila with those of Europe (Anderson, 1998). For the young anti-colonial thinker, the gardens of Manila were seen as mere pale reflections of the “authentic” gardens of Versailles or Berlin, and, for this reason, always located “behind”, running at the tail end of a vanguard Europe, situated at the head of historical developments. In a similar vein, but now inverted, how could we not identify an equally demonic and post-colonial comparison in the words of the representative of Gibraltar? The ghost of Lord Curzon hovers over these rhythms of transatlantic bordering. More than a century ago, in a classic geopolitical lecture, Curzon referred to the Afghan Northwest frontier as a “forge” of British masculine character (­Curzon, 1907). More than a century later, we may perceive in the words of the representative of Gibraltar before his Spanish counterpart a decidedly Curzon-like formulation through the implication that Gibraltar is only a pale reflection of an island located across the Atlantic, where real “men” died. This “archaic” dialectic between the internal/external borders of E ­ urope today brings us to a second observation. To the degree that the term “decolonization” continues to be mobilized to describe the problematic of ­Gibraltar and the Falklands, thus resurrecting phantasms of national-­territorial and demographic unity, I argue that the very nature of frontiers is undergoing unforeseen shifts, rendering the “centre-periphery” models of old increasingly obsolete. This is because both sets of borders – internal to the EU as well as Latin America – are now being subject to “more diffuse appropriations”, inscribed in flows that exceed and transcend the frame “Europe/ Latin America”, and, as a result require “surprising cartographies” capable of re-contextualizing them according to vaster and more multidimensional criteria (Chambers, 2012). Such a frame would need to embrace a macro-context defined by the diffusion of neoliberal political-economic as well as “security” principles, under a logic meant to destabilize and weaken the sovereignties of Latin American states. These strategies, emanating from military sources in the United States as well as the EU, are concentrated in the borderlands of the South American continent, reimagined as “grey zones” and “ungovernable areas”, the axes of “failed states” or spaces for new erupting conflicts related to the flow of legalized (oil, gas, water, minerals) and/or clandestine goods (drugs, contraband, human trafficking). These border conflicts, both legal and para-legal, are perceived as facilitating significant autonomous irredentist movements, as in the region of Zulia in ­Venezuela, the Bolivarian Oriente, the province of Tarija in Argentina or that of the Pando in Peru (Manero, 2007).

138  Olivier Thomas Kramsch Under this more expansive, transatlantic optic, Gibraltar could be apprehended no longer as “last-corner-to-be-reunited-with-Spain” but as an important node in a burgeoning archipelago of privatized “fiscal paradises” which would include Luxembourg and The Netherlands within, as well as the Bahamas and Cayman Islands, outside of “Europe”. In the same vein, the so-called “Triple Border” between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina would have to be reconceptualized beyond their respective national territories, taking into account the supposed presence of Hezbollah and transcontinental political Islam (Manero, 2007); the riverine border between French Guyana and Brazil could be illuminated as a strategic space for France and the EU to project themselves into “their” European and Amazon border region so as to intervene in global debates on sustainable development (­Boudoux d’Hautefeuille, 2010; Kramsch, 2016); and one would have to resituate the northern border between Mexico and the United States by way of a branch-plant industry ever more connected to China and Southeast Asia (Alegría Olazábal, 2009). In each context, the border regions of Latin America could be grasped as “laboratories” for the testing of neoliberal and securitarian strategies that can then be exported to other parts of the world (Manero, 2007). But simply to assert the ever more transnational (and global) nature of Latin American borders is not adequate to capture their contemporary specificity and theoretical-political interest. We should place equal attention on the socio-spatial practices of those who inhabit these borderlands, not losing sight of how local actors actively participate in the renegotiation and re-territorialization of place and meaning in the so-called “globalized” borderlands so that they secrete an infinitely more interesting and complex habitat than those produced by abstract strategic-military or geopolitical representations. In the border area between México and the United States, for instance, such a lens would open up an analytical space that would allow us to see the urbanized border as more than a postmodern trans-frontier unity in which the border plays only an epiphenomenal role in everyday life (Dear and Lucero, 2005), or as two cities living apart in an unmixed state (Alegría Olazábal, 2009). In this vision of the borderland, we need to recuperate the notion of the “everydayness” (“cotidianeidad”) of the border (Bustamante, 1981), something that does not erase the reality of the border but preserves a space of autonomy and freedom in the renegotiation of its meaning (Aparna, 2013; Aponte Motta, 2017; Iglesias-Prieto, 2017).

Towards Euro-Latin American horizon Given the foregoing, I propose another way of “seeing” European and Latin American borders in their entangled relation, not as lines that mark the ends of separated worlds but rather as a series of interlinked socio-spatial horizons (see Lois, 2014). The study of the horizons of a properly Euro-Latin ­American modernity would reveal spaces that gesture towards “other spaces”, largely

Beyond the “lettered border”  139 hidden from sight of the European metropolis and other so-called centres of power. Addressed both scientifically and across the canvas of world literature, horizons have typically denoted a space located between earth and sky, at a point where human sight “trembles”. In the words of Didier Maleuvre, a horizon “marks not the factual edge of the world, but the shifting line where perception trails off” (Maleuvre, 2011: xiii). In so doing, it would reveal a specific historical truth in the geo-historical context of ­Euro-Latin ­American relations: for being located “far away”, since the time of the Treaty of T ­ ordesillas and its failed cartographic utopias, ­European and post-­independent Latin American nation-states never fully controlled the actions of subjects occupying the spaces of their respective Latin A ­ merican frontiers (Zárate Botía, 2008). It is in this way that we may speak of the fundamental “hiddenness” of borders located at the margins of a global, colonial m ­ odernity, both within and outside “Europe” (Kramsch, 2012b). At this juncture, we could take inspiration from poet-flaneur Louis Aragon, who, almost a century ago, in his vagabondage “from below” across the urban landscape of Paris under fully destructive Hausmannization, proposed: “C’est l’heure du frisson, qui ressemble a crier a un trait d’encre noire. Nous nous réjouissons d’etre des encriers” (1926: 179).4 Let us therefore be ink pots! To the degree that they limit perception and themselves embody the notion of limit, horizons interpolate subjects immanently dwelling within, rather than external to, a landscape (Maleuvre, 2011, drawing on Casey, 1998). Horizons are therefore phenomenologically inhabited. According to María Lois Barrio, they: Establish and mark reference points, spatialize geohistorical contexts for the representation of space and collective time, and in so doing produce and reproduce the social order, influencing not only material practices but communities of destiny, the spaces of everyday imagination, from where we build the symbolic horizons of socio-political practices and representations. (Lois, 2014: 242; translated from Spanish by author; emphasis in original) Rather than reduced to a sharply bounded locality, however, in their very imperceptibility horizons also gesture to a “beyond”, an unfulfilled elsewhere that provokes subjects to a radically destabilizing view of the “Self” and the “Other”, as occurs to Count Bezúkhov, who, standing on a hill on the Franco-Russian front at the battle of Borodino (1812), looks down onto a “living landscape, and try as he might … could not make out any m ­ ilitary positioning … [or] even tell our troops from theirs” (Tolstoy, 1868/2016: ­844–845); or as experienced by Lawrence, who, on finally taking Akaba – “the horizon of our minds” – in 1917 together with several hundred ­Howeitat warriors, claims that in “the blank light of victory we could scarcely identify ourselves … though my site was sharp, I never saw men’s features: always

140  Olivier Thomas Kramsch I peered beyond, imagining for myself a spirit-reality of this or that  …” (­Lawrence, 1926/2008: 322). The spatial concept of horizon would also immediately flag a fundamental attribute: “vanishing points”, from where ­unknown actors emerge within the interstices of modern global architectures. Here precisely, we would need to re-appropriate strategic-military border syllogisms such as “grey areas”, but rather than considering them as areas of contagion or danger, re-animate and inhabit them both theoretically and methodologically. In addition to having their own “space”, horizons also contain an important temporal dimension, given that they produce a futurity (or “virtuality”), and in this manner point to a yet-to-be imagined condition that is distinct from the oppressive national utopias that preoccupied Rama. ­Social theorist Rheinhardt Kosellek once famously defined European modernity as riven by a fundamental tension between the “space of experience” (Raum der Erfahrung) and a “horizon of expectation” (Horizont der ­Erwartung); the former referred to the spaces of everyday life of locally rooted populations sedimented in small-scale rural settings, villages and land; the ­latter signalled modernist, urban-based utopian imaginaries embedded in ­large-scale fantasies of social change and societal improvement, including radical architectural interventions to transform the social order (Kosellek, 1979). If our abovementioned intuition of the “dailiness” (cotideanidad) of ­Latin-American borders is even minimally correct, we may productively decentre and “entangle” the European location of Kosellek’s framework so that Euro-Latin American “horizons” today are secreted within the experiential spaces of borderlands either side of the Atlantic in a mutual call and response. In this sense, and in the wake of the much celebrated “reassertion of space in critical social theory” (Soja, 1989; Jameson, 1991), we reinsert a dynamic temporality to the idea of a Euro-Latin American horizon so as to emphasize the expansive and multidirectional character of the collective memories that cross-pollinate the construction of borders on both continents. In this way, Euro-Latin American horizons can be productively conceptualized as spaces deeply infused with a political, parabolic and inextinguishable desire that is irreducible to identitarian essentialisms, highlighting both difference and interdependence. Whereas in the era of Lord Curzon imperial frontiers were seen as peripheral places, forges producing the best, most virile, homogenous and virtuous British character, generative of that “imperial race” so beloved by Sir H ­ alford Mackinder, today socio-spatial horizons are spaces in whose shadows pulse subaltern energies that secrete “the Other”, the stranger, “otherness”, a dynamic which resituates them at the centre of struggles over political modernity today. In order to adequately see these horizons, in all their theoretical as well as political potential, we need to recuperate the ex-centric and comparative gaze of an Ángel Rama. But we would need to recuperate Rama not as some quintessence of Latin American intellectuality, but as an exile, an Uruguayan in “difficult” circumstances, a foreign professor in a foreign

Beyond the “lettered border”  141 country, a man “out of place”, with an expired passport, struggling with the US immigration authorities as much as with the House Subcommittee for Un-American Activities, while attempting to ­finish a book, that would later be called, The Lettered City.

Acknowledgements An original version of this essay was first given as a lecture before a large and receptive Ibero/Latin American audience at the Universidad Complutense, Madrid (Seminario Internacional: Reconfiguraciones Geopolíticas y Modernidad Global: América Latina y Europa en Perspectiva Comparada, 16–17 December 2013). I thank Heriberto Cairo and Breno Bringel for their careful and generous editorial guidance in preparing the book chapter for this volume. A special agradecimiento goes to Breno Bringel for pointing me in the direction of Reinhart Kosellek’s work.

Notes 1 English translation: “The question is, from the irritation that produces a certain skepticism towards regional divisions in particular, and Transitology in general, I thought it more imaginative to propose, from the same context of production, a somewhat more blurred vision, projected from a minute incision within conventional perspectives.” Translated and used with permission by Maria Lois. 2 English translation: “The Lettered City”. 3 Spanish original: “Acato pero no obedezco”. 4 English translation: “It is the hour of the shudder, which resembles like a shout a vial of dark ink. We rejoice in being ink pots.” Translated by the author.

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8 Beyond a regional gaze? Orders, borders and modern geopolitical imaginations in Europe and Latin America1 María Lois

Some time ago, as I was beginning to collect information to write an article on borders in Latin America, two news items caught my attention; according to a La Razón article on 20 June 2013, on 24 April of that year Bolivia had filed a lawsuit against Chile before the International Court of Justice in The Hague (The Netherlands) demanding a negotiation for its access to the ­Pacific Ocean. Shortly after, on 12 June 2013, the European Parliament’s news channel published a press release with a Eurobarometer update which stated that 62% of respondents held that freedom of movement would be the main achievement of the integration project developed by the ­European ­Union (EU). Both news items contained some of the most widespread characteristics of the imaginary linked to borders: on the one hand, border disputes in Latin America. Diving into the chronology of this dispute, we could interpret the questioning of the boundary marked in the Peace and ­Friendship Treaty signed in 1904 and the state-centric discourses deployed by the parties involved as a pivotal point of state sovereignty. The forum involved in the resolution of the legal claim, a court located in Europe, stressed the link between the disputes and the processes of decolonization of the region, recreated some centuries later, but linked to the historical construction of the Latin American states. Within the EU, by contrast, free movement between member countries was reaffirmed as the bulwark of an institutional project that was, however, clearly called into question by the so-called euro crisis that basically affected the Union’s southern countries. On the basis of the results of the survey from which the news item comes, we could even assume that the majority of citizens understand the Schengen area as a territory with an absolutely lax mobility regime, practised by nomads free of the territorial ties of the old States. In this universe of liquid cosmopolitanism, interstate borders would be little more than relics of a distant past. Such a generalization, helped by the recurrent news about pending border disputes in Latin America, would provide a geopolitically homogeneous view of the region, defined on the basis of its territorial division with respect to other areas. This casual reading of the border dynamics in both regions was undoubtedly a safe, comfortable place from which to begin to write this text: the modern geopolitical imagination (Agnew, 2005). Understood as “a

146  María Lois long-dominant approach to world and to show their historical-geographical specificity in the European and, later, American encounters with the world as a whole” (Agnew, 2005: 2), the modern geopolitical imagination would have to take the form of a hegemonic spatial visualization as a way of understanding world politics, defining the geographical categories upon which the world is organized and works are derived (Agnew, 2005: 9). Modern geopolitical imagination would materialize in some dominant geopolitical assumptions that are constantly re-working and re-defining the common sense of the global space, analysing its implications for the conceptualization of power relations on the international scale is one of the purposes of critical geopolitics (for more on this see Agnew, 2005). One of these assumptions is that “the world is actively spatialized, divided up, labelled, sorted out into a hierarchy of places of greater or lesser ‘importance’” (Agnew, 2005: 3); in this way, different spatial blocks form this global space, projecting themselves as internally homogeneous regions whose characteristics are defined in relation to their relationship with the historical trajectory of the dominant block, made up of Europe and the United States, are converted into normative horizons. In this way, the visualization of the world as a whole is gradually performed, which makes world politics possible, and whose territorially regionalized attributes make up a moral geopolitics: that of the modern geopolitical imagination. Read from that perspective, this border conflict would perfectly evoke that hierarchically defined regional division, where one of these blocks – because of its extra-European character (therefore, more backward in historical experience) – is trapped in an attempt to signify itself on the basis of one of the key attributes of state territoriality, that is, through a demand for a border delimitation. Parallel to the presentation of the case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Bolivian President Evo Morales invited the President of Chile to the inauguration of a stretch of highway of the Pacific-Atlantic Bioceanic Corridor, as noted in an El Día article on 8 March 2013. This project, mainly financed by the Andean Development Corporation (CAF), would promote a route that would link the Atlantic ports of southern Brazil with those of northern Chile through Bolivian territory on the basis of a cross-border geopolitical imagination of regional integration understood as a necessary boost to trade. Almost at the same time, the European Parliament was debating the dimensions of a reform of the regulations of the Schengen area; a recurring issue since the so-called Arab Spring, and promoted by the Commission, the idea being to regulate the necessary requirements for the identifying of the exceptional circumstances (European Parliament, 11 June 2013) necessary to justify the temporary reintroduction of internal controls at interstate borders. In this second foray into the world politics of borders, the reference to different integration projects in the Latin American region went hand in hand with frequent requests from EU member countries for greater flexibility in the conditions for unilateral suspension of the Schengen treaty. The regional imaginations around border dynamics were saturated

Beyond a regional gaze?  147 with different angles and perspectives to incorporate, on the one hand, integration projects in Latin America, involving the country embroiled in the border dispute over access to the sea with Chile; and, on the other hand, the powerful vision of the borders as a mobility control device, periodically deployed as a territorial icon against the insecurity of the Western European states. Finally, the third stage of the journey from which to establish a moment of encounter between the borders in Latin America and Europe led me to a spatially disordered location, that is, to the borders of the EU in Latin America, in fact to the paradigmatic example of a border located beyond the regional gaze.2 Suriname claims sovereignty over an area of 5,000 sq. km of French Guyana between the Marouini river (Maroni) and the Litani river (Itany), both tributaries of the Lawa river. The dispute, as is often the case, dates back to colonial times, when France and Holland submitted the dispute to the Russian tsar in 1891. Suriname initially accepted the border proposed by the Netherlands at the time of its independence (1975) but was later willing to accept the delimitation proposed by France (1977) in exchange for development aid. However, a more recent agreement closing the gap between the two is pending ratification. Maroni is also the surname of a former Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni. Maroni was the promoter and responsible for the implementation, in 2008, of the so-called Pacheto Sicurezza (something like the Security Package), the first of a series of periodic measures aimed at maintaining security in the country. In its first version, the Package elevated irregular immigration to the category of a crime, racializing the criminal mobile subject through the link between gypsy settlements in cities such as Rome or Verona and public insecurity, in line with the discourse and political practice of his party, the Northern League. Despite the continuous public denunciations of racism and xenophobia, the Italian government’s defence of the suspension of the Schengen Treaty and its use of borders as a territorial mobility control device sent Romania, a member country of the EU and also the country of origin of these groups, to the bottom rung of EU membership, that of the abject citizen of Europe (Hepworth, 2012). With regard to the Maronis, therefore, the overlapping of complex meanings and different formats of borders in Europe and Latin America was reconfirmed, with the toponym of a geographical feature used as a marker of colonial territorial delimitations mixed with the different citizenship statuses linked to the EU’s mobility regimes. And there also appear EU border practices linked to development aid to project spaces for transaction and the elimination of political differences as in the paradigmatic case of the ­European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), among others. In this context, these policies appear as a key mechanism for the negotiation of disagreement by the Latin American recipient, Suriname; at the same time, we find ourselves at the borderline, in this case, at the European border located in the Latin American region.

148  María Lois This whole excursion across mixed sources to find a point to start my writing was instrumental in reflecting on aspects of the notions of limits and borders; beyond the casual and the anecdotal, fragmented visions appear, overlapping processes, where borders and limits change, are transposed, and, above all, show cultural and historical specificities due to their multidimensional nature. Borders establish and mark references, spatialize geo-­h istorical contexts of representation of collective space and time, and therefore, of production and reproduction of the social order, affecting not only material practices but also the community of destiny, the spaces of daily imagination, from where we construct the material and symbolic horizons of socio-political practices and representations. As we have just seen, borders, as the ways in which communities are delimited and defined spatially, are constantly changing. Spatial socialization, understood as a process through which individual actors and collectives are socialized as members of territorially delimited entities and adopt specific forms of thought and action (Paasi, 1996; Lois, 2013), is in permanent construction and reconstruction, as are socio-territorial orders. From this starting point, this text aspires to bring up some questions about the role of borders in Europe and Latin America, their insurmountable paradoxes, and the variability of their spaces and times. Constructed from a fragmented political geography and with a provincial vocation, this text oscillates from underlining borders as a pretext for parochialism and spatial heterogeneity evocations to the centrality of borders in contemporary geopolitical reconfigurations. In this sense, some emancipatory dimensions of borders with respect to regional views ordered by the modern geopolitical imagination will be visited. Following the aim of the book, possibilities of interregionalism and transnationalism may be explored, since the geopolitical crossed gazes between Europe and Latin America remain usually immersed in space-time traps. In one side, by understanding the relationship between both regions as the sum of the relationship of their states, reflecting a sort of regional state-centrism that projects the regions as the aggregation of their territorial components. In the other side, Latin America is negatively portrayed from a time trap that identifies the region as backward, as laying behind Europe in a development timeline defined by modern geopolitical imagination. Finally, an account based on the development of modernity and its consequences (imperialism, coloniality, dependence, etc.) that focuses on material and symbolic violence as the beginning and the end of any possible engaging gaze between both regions. Being aware of the difficulty of circumventing these views, my purpose would be to develop an approach to imaginaries and practices of articulation, overlapping, negotiation, otherness or resistance, on the basis of the inevitable encounter that forms part of the construction of both regions. Following Kramsch (2014) and others, I consider it necessary to understand the borders in and of ­Europe by envisaging the fronts and lines of civilizational and cultural interaction where shared modernities are resolved, co-produced between Europe

Beyond a regional gaze?  149 and the other regions of the world through which the region has been geo-­ historically signified (Latin America, in this case; but also, Africa or Asia). All these regions are post-colonial territories, that is, they are linked to a process of definition in the face of the colonial Other as a political subject and with a history of encounters and misunderstandings with this European modernity. Thus, a look at borders as key elements in the construction of regional geopolitical imaginations and their encounters and misunderstandings will be the basis for attempting dialogues and inter-visions, revealing in a somewhat heterodox way a constellation of common problems and possible reciprocal learning. I will do this exercise through what Doreen Massey (1999) called conversations, that is to say, from a practice of abandoning limits and disciplinary structures to try to move through uncommon places of reflection, from a reading of the press to different discursive and material practices from where to add points of escape and connectivity.

Where is the border? In recent years, many studies have stressed the need for a multidimensional perspective in border research (Perkman and Sum, 2001; van ­Houtum, Kramsch and Zierhofer, 2005; Paasi, 2005; Agnew, 2008; Lois, 2014a), and the conceptualization of borders as historically contingent processes (­Newman and Paasi, 1998: 201). While borders grew as part of states and their creation, political identifications are constructed through bordering practices (Kuus, 2010: 671–672), understood as “a vast array of affective and transformative material processes in which social and spatial orders and disorders are constantly reworked” (Woodward and Jones, 2005: 239). Re-thinking borders through bordering practices means understanding such practices as implicit in the construction of those borders, approachable as incomplete developments, always in process of materialization (Prokkola, 2008). Therefore, assuming the ambiguous nature of borders (Agnew, 2008: 176), and the changing and contradictory processes surrounding their constant reproduction, led, in the 2000s, to a possibility of overcoming a conceptualization of borders in binary terms, as mechanisms of delimitation between States; at the same time, it allows to stop thinking of them as places in the process of disappearing, or as permanent, static and spatially fixed structures. ­Although borders have been territorial projections of the infrastructural power of the State (O’Dowd, 2010), to imagine them just as the lines in which political and social control materializes through the separation of spaces would leave out a wide range of nuances from which they might be observed. A cross analysis of Europe and Latin America could be paradigmatic in locating the development of this idea. In October 2012, I received an email from an Argentine colleague who was travelling to Madrid (Spain) to present her work at an international congress asking for guidance about entering Spain. In Buenos Aires (Argentina), she had approached the Foreign Ministry to find out what the requirements for her trip were. There she was

150  María Lois presented with an endless list, including a requirement that I visit a police station in Madrid where I was required to process, among other things, a letter of invitation signed before a notary public, as well as a series of reliable proofs of situations of previous co-presence with a person that in this case I had personally never seen before. In an attempt to decipher the codes of bureaucratic border practices surrounding entry into Spain, contact with individuals who had previously crossed that border (basically, the ­Argentine diaspora), and who were to a greater or lesser extent familiar with this practice, led us to decide that an explicit letter of invitation from the Congress, a return air ticket and a two-day hotel reservation could be a way to resolve the issue of crossing the border for a business trip. At Madrid airport, no one asked her anything. What she came for, when she was going to leave, where she was going to stay, nothing. The journey was completed without any documentary support other than a valid passport. The construction of bureaucratic networks and processes articulated by institutional actors from both states was dismantled by its implementation by border policy agents. At the same time, the link between border making and agency, that is, individuals or collectives, and relational constellations in general that subvert, question, reproduce or construct that border, while in many cases being physically distant from it, thus became evident. This anecdote suggests fundamental questions for the work on borders: Where exactly was the border for this trip? In the security agents working at the destination airport? In the police station of a district of Madrid? In the notary who certified a letter of invitation, in the officials of the Foreign Office of the country of origin or in the narratives of the people who defied the official ritual based on their own practice and experience of that border? In short, a key question clearly emerged: how and for whom is the border between the two states planned? The same kind of questions, formulated in a more elaborate and academic way, have also been the subject of a recent discussion among experts (Johnson et al., 2011: 61–69), about where we place borders when we do border research. The deadlines for applying for notarial certification, the virtualization of the issuance of visas or the narratives, experiences and visions of individuals and groups refer to border practices that are far from the border, and which would necessarily form part of a frame of reference where time and space at the border are elastic. The border is spatially dislocated (e.g. in computers, police offices, airports, diasporas at origin, destination and transit, visa issuing offices, etc.), and temporally expanded, in a process that goes far beyond the immediacy of traversing the border crossing space (Lois and Cairo, 2011). Accepting all these issues for border research would imply an urgent de-essentialization of the partnership between borderline and border dynamics. The intelligibility of the bordering processes would therefore include an approach to a broader relational and spatial constellation than the context of the borderline itself. Addressing border research as multidimensional mechanisms of boundary production, but on multiple scales and in multiple places also requires greater conceptual sophistication

Beyond a regional gaze?  151 to incorporate different actors, practices and contexts into an overall theoretical framework. How border practices are deployed and produced was thus confirmed as a research topic (Lois and Cairo, 2011). The “where” of the border obviously too, arising also from a de-identification of the relationship between geographical context and border dynamics. And the “how” and “for whom” the border turned into a main question to explore the regionalized view of borders, in this case from the institutions and agencies involved in border policies in both contexts.

Borders for the centre, borders for the periphery From here, then, we may start another conversation; right from where regional views often saturate border research, distributing border practices according to the region of their location. In these regional views, Europe and the EU are projected as a paradigm of an area with no conflicts over borders, spatially manifest, in the case of the EU, in the form of free transit. In the case of Latin America, the regional approach to borders would result in two issues: that border disputes are numerous and that they would easily evolve towards war (Cairo and Lois 2014). Certainly, in some disputes, there have been escalating tensions, but many others have also been resolved peacefully, to a greater or lesser extent. However, it is in these two regions that we find the borders that monopolize the most academic research and media attention: the border between the United States and Mexico, and the border between Spain and Morocco. The case of the Spanish-Moroccan border, the so-called southern border of the EU, has become one of the emblematic places to study border dynamics, with an important input of funding not only from the EU itself but also, for example, from the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States. Much of the academic work most frequently referred to and cited on this border portrays it as a place of death and repression, based on the consequences of the EU’s migration policy for its external borders. In other words, a border built on the thousands of dead that have unfortunately turned the Mediterranean Sea into a cemetery; and, at the same time, when the focus is on Ceuta and Melilla, barbed wire fences and internment centres. That is, a portrait of the border saturated with normalizing representations of geographies of exclusion, marginality and disciplined repression. However, it is interesting to contrast these portraits with the data on s­ o-called extra-­legal migration to Europe produced by various institutional actors (­Frontex) or non-governmental organizations (Zuppiroli, 2014), which highlight that the majority of irregular entries take place at airports with a tourist visa. This leads us to ask ourselves whether those investigations would not also be returning the border to its more classical conceptualization, that is, to the delimited and fixed terrestrial border line, the territorial device of mobility control, the regulator of a clash between social groups, the space of arrival, the limit, passive geographies, the periphery. Perhaps with the best of

152  María Lois intentions, and without doubting their capacity for moral denunciation – in the sense proposed by Enrique Dussel, that is, “by the application to a concrete decision of the current principles of the system” (Dussel, 1977: 76), these academic practices, in addition to coming dangerously close to certain xenophobic discourses in which irregular migration is racialized and stereotyped, in a way rewrite, in this case, the hierarchies between the EU and the rest of the world. What happens on the borders of Europe is finally projected as an exceptional question, so to speak, referring to historical imaginaries of the reproduction of glances closed in on themselves and their logic of purity (Campbell and Shapiro, 1999; Lugones, 1999) in the encounter with the Other. Far from an ethical reflection, that is to say, one that accepts the “capacity to know how to think the world from the alterative exteriority of the other […] that could call into question the moral principles of the system” (Dussel, 1977: 65–77), certain perspectives in Border Studies could end up reaffirming some of these moral principles. It may be interesting to examine the reproduction of this encounter in research on the border between the United States and Mexico, and to explore the representations of the border and its character as a marker of an encounter with the Other, and reading it in a key not only of a regional geopolitical imagination but also local and global ones, something pointed out by Aparna (2013), for example, in his research on the border in the daily life of the locals of Tijuana; in the multiple investigations on the outsourcing of borders and the stretching of bordering spaces (Casas, Cobarrubias and Pickles, 2010) in both regions, or in the work of Riofrío (2012), where the impact of the mobility policy in Ecuador on the crossing of the border between Spain and Africa is analysed. All these dimensions and scales are also central to the production of border imaginations, since they affect their conception as devices for controlling mobility, in the Maroni style, thus blurring the projection of a border that is spectacular and spectacularized, over-­represented through the practices of risk and repression of irregular crossing and the security mechanisms associated with traditional state territoriality.

Spectacular borders, boring borders It is also worth mentioning here the limited space that other narrative and practices also related to borders found in Border Studies. In the European context, and in contrast to the spectacular or hot borders that generate academic expectation and media headlines, the internal borders that separate the states that make up the EU were paradigmatically called boring (Strüver, 2005), based on their alleged inability to generate interest. Notably, this qualification was used for the first time to refer to an exceptional work on the border between Germany and the Netherlands (Strüver, 2005), a centre of border conflicts and wars in Europe in the past, but which since the 2000s has become a significant hegemonic source of border boredom. In this logic, these borders become places linked to geography of peace understood as

Beyond a regional gaze?  153 the absence of conflict; in this conversation, my question would be whether this boredom, this boredom that makes them uninteresting, is equivalent to the absence of conflict. If borders without conflict, in Borders Studies, become boring, the performance of a geopolitical imagination about borders continues to evoke a reality linked to conflict, violence, militarization, exclusion and marginality. However, at the Union’s boring interstate borders, the political content of the exceptional circumstances that are negotiated through practices such as passport controls at the border between Spain and France when entering the French TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) or at the Copenhagen train station (Denmark) if travelling to Mälmo (Sweden) are settled, as is the lack of them at border crossings on long-distance buses; or as is the case with video surveillance cameras installed on the Dutch side of the border. In this regard, we may return again to border paradoxes, such as those described by Diez in his work on Europe and the EU, when he states that the recognition of interstate borders multiplies the meanings of these limits; their de-securitization implies a subversion of their most evident dimension (Diez, 2006: 238–239), that of territorial differentiation of social groups; and, at the same time, a volatile and constant re-inscription of borders in the daily geographical imagination in relation to the spatial project of the Union. In fact, one of the main working issues around borders in the EU has been cross-border cooperation, a policy that has become a vantage point for this integration project, and also a significant reference point for cross-border cooperation in some other countries. Coming back to the above-mentioned problematic interregionalism, the use of an INTERREG manual as a guide for cross-border cooperation in West Africa (Kramsch and Brambilla, 2007), or the visit of a Brazilian government delegation to the Chaves-Verín Eurocity in 2010, in the framework of the Memorandum of Understanding between the European Commission and the Brazilian Ministry of Integration – where the members (representatives of the Meso-Regions of Alto Simoneo, Vale do Rio Acre and of the Greater ­Mercosur Fronteira) received, in addition to an introduction to good practices, their Eurocitizens card – are the sort of contexts where regional geopolitical imaginations may be experienced. I recognize the unequal relationship between the parties, but do not hold an Orientalist view either, under which the practices, models and positions issued from the EU are assumed and reproduced mimetically, removing any capacity of negotiation to the Latin American actors. This question is somewhat more complex and would lead to a discussion of the agency issues mentioned above but is far removed from the objective of this section. In any case, the practices of representing subjects as receivers and transmitters are hardly innovative. Following with the cross-border cooperation experiences, it is highly evocative to approach not only the programmatic discourses of these programs but also the spatial dimensions that derive from interventions in border areas. In fact, after a moment of EU-phoria that lasted just over a decade, some work has already gone into the practices linked to cross-border cooperation from

154  María Lois a healthily sceptical perspective, and, above all, linked to the incorporation of agency capacity as a variable in border production. The implementation of specific action plans at interstate borders through cross-border cooperation has become a key element in the integration processes in Latin America as well (Oddone, 2014; González, Cornago and Ovando, 2016) and has opened up a process of re-signification of practices and discourses on borders; how they are produced and how they are represented and recreated on a daily basis. The transformation of interstate borders from peripheries to centres through policies based on cross-border regionalization subverts their character as peripheries and places them at the centre of the construction processes of the public sphere (Balibar, 1998, as quoted in Pickles, 2005: 362), socio-political, socio-territorial and discursive practices around borders become one of the keys to the performance of cooperation, overcoming its conceptualization as a geographical structure and referring to political geographies deployed at different spatial scales and times, of polymorphic and flexible cartographies. And, in all of this, the role of individuals and collectives as subjects who ­construct, maintain or question borders – the so-called borderwork (­Rumford, 2008: 2 and ff.) – is fundamental in order to continue advancing in research into when, where and for whom they continue to function.

Final remarks To conclude, I would articulate three places from which to go beyond regional gazes to locate ex-centric narrative and visual axes – such as the borders themselves. Not with the aim of establishing an exhaustive and exemplary inventory of Border Studies, but to propose spaces of transit that are off-centre from the modern geopolitical imagination and that may make it possible to go beyond the naturalization of regionalized socio-territorial orders. First, the idea of working from an unfocused perspective in relation to the functionality of the border in itself is highly thought-provoking; a perspective focused – paradoxically – on its attempts to erase it, to soften it. Works such as Kramsch (2011) or Lois (2014b) may represent a possible opening of the conceptual lens by trying to incorporate a reading of the policies of spatial representation and socialization linked to the limits centred on the textures of border boredom. The investigations by Albuquerque (2012) or van Houtum and Gielis (2006) would be an excellent example of how to approach the constant crossing of interstate borders from multiscale perspectives incorporating specific dimensions of regional integration projects (Brazil and Paraguay, on the one hand, and Germany and The Netherlands, on the other hand), and incorporating the relational constellation through which the border is negotiated as a resource, in Latin America and Europe, afflicted by similar misfortunes. Second, it is precisely the practice of crossing the border that constitutes the border as a limit; but this crossing is, in turn, what transgresses it. In this regard, it would be interesting not to abandon its study, since it forms

Beyond a regional gaze?  155 the border as a place of passage, of intersection, with multiple possibilities, and to incorporate other stories about the intersection with the border. ­Smuggling, for example, has been widely studied as a survival and border economy strategy in both regions (Godinho, 1995; Freire, Rovisco and ­Fonseca, 2009; Simoẽs, 2009; Cardin, 2012). In my view, the transgression that smuggling represents continues to be key in the negotiation of the political content of the border in Latin America and Europe, in its different times and forms: it is the encounter with the Other that gives meaning to smuggling and establishes symbolic and materially profitable social relations from the recognition of the difference. In the case of the EU, smuggling has become an object of heritage for cultural consumption, thus remaining a visible economic activity but with different skills. It is now another dimension of the crossing, the journey to the limit, which is a key element, around which there is not only a political economy but also a whole series of in-visibilities that saturate the process. With a few exceptions (e.g. Vives, 2013; Sanchez, 2016), the rhetoric on smuggling and travel shares a common dimension in Latin America and Europe: a gendered (in)visibility at the border crossing, which portrays its crossing as a masculinized activity. Finally, an approach to the construction of the border as a tourist product has become an interesting way of studying the political dimensions of a process through its simulation. This tourism manifests itself in various practices such as rebuilding border crossing as part of the border experience. This adventure can be consumed on the Laos-Thailand border (it includes a walk on the Mekong River and a stamp on the passport confirming that one has passed to the other side); it is also part of the amenities offered by at least two Finnish companies – not necessarily located on the border – that reproduce a Finnish-Russian border crossing that includes fake Russian border guards drinking vodka (Löytynoja, 2007); and is one of the most popular activities at the EcoAlberto theme park in the state of Hidalgo (central ­Mexico), where the border crossing into the United States is recreated. Managed by the HñaHñu Indians, the tour features “coyotes” and fake agents from the US Border Patrol, as noted in an El País article on 17 April 2015. It is perhaps in the encounter between the construction of the border as a tourist attraction and its re-production of the border as spaces of spectacular repression that some of the coordinates of its re-construction as mobility control devices are located, a common denominator to its constant reconfiguration as symbols of traditional territorial orders.

Notes 1 The key ideas in this text emerged from a research stay at the Nijmegen Center for Border Research (NCBR) of Radboud University (The Netherlands), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education through the José Castillejo Mobility Program. Some of the main discussions are published in Lois (2014a) and in Lois (2017). 2 I would like to thank Oliver Kramsch for bringing this location to our boring borders conversations.

156  María Lois

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Beyond a regional gaze?  157 Lois, María (2014b) “Performing the Boring Border: Spatial Stories at the Euregio Rhine-Waal.” Paper presented at the 23rd World Congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), Montreal, July 19–25. Lois, María (2017) “Geopolítica de la Paz y Estudios de Frontera.” La Migraña, no. 22, 90–95. Lois, María, and Cairo, Heriberto (2011) “Desfronterización y refronterización en la Península Ibérica.” Geopolítica(s), vol. 2, no. 1, 11–22. Löytynoja, Tanja (2007) “National Boundaries and Place-making in Tourism: Staging the Finnish-Russian Border.” Nordia Geographical Publications, vol. 36, no. 4, 35–45. Lugones, María (1999) “Pureza, impureza y separación.” In N. Carbonell and M. Torras (comps.) Feminismos literarios. Madrid: Arco Libros, 235–265. Massey, Doreen (1999) “Negotiating Disciplinary Boundaries.” Current Sociology, vol. 47, no. 4, 5–12. Newman, David (2006) “The Lines that Continue to Separate Us: Borders in our Borderless World.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 30, no. 2, 1–19. Newman, David, and Paasi, Anssi (1998) “Fences and Neighbours in the Post-­ modern World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 22, no. 2, 186–207. Oddone, Nahuel (2014) “Cooperación Transfronteriza en América Latina: Una aproximación teórica al escenario centroamericano desde la experiencia del Proyecto Fronteras Abiertas.” Oikos, vol. 13, no. 2, 129–144. O’Dowd, Liam (2010) “From a ‘Borderless World’ to a ‘World of Borders’: Bringing History Back In.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28, no. 6, 1031–1050. Paasi, Anssi (1996) Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness. The Changing ­Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. Chichester: Wiley. Paasi, Anssi (2005) “Generations and the ‘Development’ of Border Studies.” ­ Geopolitics, vol. 10, no. 4, 663–661. Perkman, Markus, and Sum, Ngai-Ling (2001) “Globalization, Regionalization and Cross-Border Regions: Scales, Discourses and Governance.” In M. Perkman and N-L. Sum (eds.) Globalization, Regionalization and Cross-Border Regions. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 3–24. Pickles, John (2005) “‘New Cartographies’ and the Decolonization of European Geographies.” Area, vol. 37, no. 4, 355–364. Prokkola, Eeva-Kaisa (2008) Making Bridges, Removing Barriers. Cross-border ­Cooperation and Identity at the Finnish-Swedish Border. Oulu: Nordia Geographical Publications. Riofrío, Miriam (2012) La externalización de la frontera española y su incidencia en el cambio de rutas migratorias provenientes de África: el caso de Ecuador en el período 2008–2010. MA thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Rumford, Chris (2008) “Citizens and Borderwork in Europe.” Space and Polity, vol. 12, no. 1, 1–12. Sanchez, Gabriella (2016) “Women’s Participation in the Facilitation of Human Smuggling: The Case of the US Southwest.” Geopolitics, vol. 21, no. 2, 387–406. Simoẽs, Dulce (2009) “O contrabando em Barrancos; memórias de um tempo de guerra.” In D. Freire, E. Rovisco and I. Fonseca (coords.) Contrabando na Fronteira Luso-Espanhola. Práticas, Memórias e Patrimónios. Lisboa: Edições Nelson de Matos, 165–195. Strüver, Anke (2005) Stories of the ‘Boring Border’: The Dutch-German Borderscape in People’s Minds. Münster: Lit Verlag.

158  María Lois van Houtum, Henk, Kramsch, Olivier, and Zierhofer, Wolfgang (eds.) (2005) B ­ /ordering Space. Aldershot: Ashgate. van Houtum, Henk, and Gielis, Ruben (2006) “Elastic Migration: The Case of Dutch Short-distance Transmigrants in Belgian and German Borderlands.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, vol. 97, no. 2, 195–202. Vives, Celia (2013) Through the Border: Senegalese Gendered Migration to Spain (2005–2010). PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, Canada. Woodward, Keith, and Jones, John Paul (2005) “On the Border with Deleuze and Guattari.” In H. van Houtum, O. Kramsch and W. Zierhofer (eds.) B/Ordering Space. Aldershot: Ashgate, 234–248. Zuppiroli, Jennifer (2014) Valoración de la integración de los grupos de migrantes vulnerables en España. Informe Nacional España. Madrid: ACCEM. [On line. Available at: www.accem.es/valoracion-de-la-integracion-de-los-grupos-de-­ migrantes-en-situacion-mas-vulnerable-en-espana/. Accessed on: 23 April 2016].

Part III

(Inter)regionalism from below Social actors, pedagogies and transnational practices

9 Interregionalism from below Cultural affinity, translation and solidarities in the IberoAmerican space Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo Introduction The “Global South” is an expression that appears more and more ­frequently in academic texts, the press and in the jargon of social movements, non-­ governmental organizations (NGOs) and solidarity groups. It is often no more than an updated synonym for the Third World, the periphery or the underdeveloped world, and as such it refers only to a group of countries that, while relatively heterogeneous culturally and politically, nevertheless share a peripheral or semi-peripheral structural position in the modern world-system. This is how the expression is used by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1995: 506–519) who to some extent helped to popularize it. If there is a Global South, there also has to be a Global North; both these definitions are additions to the idea of the traditional “North-South divide” made fashionable by the Brandt Report of the 1970s, which provided indisputable evidence that two regions were taking shape amidst the far-­reaching processes of globalization. However, Santos (2002a: 16) also uses it metaphorically to refer to “the systemic human suffering caused by global capitalism”. In other words, the expression alludes as much to a structural as to a moral geography. Also used are associated concepts that have a more precise meaning implying involvement. An example of this is the concept of “global countryside”, a term coined by Michael Woods (2007) to refer to a hypothetical space representing the theoretical ultimate outcome of current globalizing processes in rural areas. With this, the convergence of peasant (subaltern) struggles in the Global South and the Global North can be expressed. Such a space would not be led by the Global North but would be of hybrid resistance, with action against the processes of globalization being taken by different actors at several levels and scales. Understood in this way, it could form part of the processes on which “counter-hegemonic globalization” was/is constructed. According to S ­ antos (2006: 84), this would be “the transnational action of those movements, associations and organization that defend the interests and groups that are relegated or marginalized by global capitalism”. It would involve the action

162  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo of the “third sector”, which is torn between being a passive instrument in the modern/colonial world-system, albeit one with the benevolent character that befits a good master, or becoming a focus of struggle and resistance to such a system of global power relations. In this chapter, we aim to shed some light on networks of international solidarity that take action on this last field of discussion. These are not always the most vociferous or revolutionary. But they are those that are willing to accept convergence with the voiceless subaltern groups of the Global South without trying to teach them a path to salvation (in this respect, they differ from the old “proletariat internationalism” that ultimately served the state) or intervening in their activities in order to lead them to a “revolutionary haven”. We shall also reflect on the transnational networks that bridge the gap between social organizations of the Global North and South more directly, specifically between Europe and Latin America. At the present time, however, the Global South has not been constituted as such; in our opinion, there are only processes of articulation, that advance and retreat according to the different scenarios that we have experienced in the last decades. One of the most important instruments of articulation with respect to social movements, NGOs and other social actors was the World Social Forum (WSF). Present circumstances make it too complex to reproduce at state level something similar to the Bandung Conference, which gave rise to the non-aligned movement at the height of the Cold War, although some initiatives have been taken in this general direction (e.g. coordination of countries from the South within the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the New Delhi Agenda between Brazil, India and South Africa to create a new commercial geography of the world). On the ground, however, we come across globalization processes affecting large regions or certain regions where they have had a greater impact. In short, we shall attempt to explore the lines of interregional articulation in these globalization processes, during the cycle of solidarities that began with the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and ended with the world economic crises that began in 2007, as we shall see later. We consider that in many ways these do not happen fortuitously or in the abstract, but are shaped around fields of geographical proximity and/or cultural affinity. Geographical proximity is a well-known phenomenon with respect to participation in WSFs and important alter-globalist meetings. When a forum takes place in Brazil, we find mostly Brazilians and Latin Americans. If a demonstration against the WTO is held in Hong Kong, many activists will be from Korea and Eastern Asia in general. But cultural affinity acts in other ways. The wanton massacre by pro-Indonesian militias of the people of Timor in 1999 was reported in English and Spanish newspapers with just a few lines on the inside pages, but in Portugal it was front-page news, which generated a huge solidarity

Interregionalism from below  163 movement. In the same way, the coup d’état in Honduras in 2009 had much more media coverage in Spain than in other European countries and it was also in this country where the first protests and displays of solidarity towards the deposed government and the Honduran people took place, with almost spontaneous protest meetings outside the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Honduran Embassy called by social movements. Along these same lines, we shall examine how Ibero-American g­ eopolitical representation, usually promoted by the governments of the S ­ panish-speaking Latin American republics, plus Portugal and Spain – especially the latter – (see Chapter 3) could become a space of counter-­representation.1 The emergence of these spaces of representation that challenge hegemonic representation of space is due largely to the work of “translation” of social activists in the field of cultural affinity. Indeed, it is a space that links two countries from the Global North (once again, Spain in particular) and their social organizations, with one of the political articulations of the Global South.

Translation and translators: activisms, knowledge and social practices Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002b) proposes the development of a new type of “reason” for understanding the world. This would be much more than just another general theory or type of social science as it considers that “without a critique of the dominant western rationality model […] all proposals put forward by new social analyses, however alternative they are considered to be, will tend to reproduce the same effects of concealment and discredit” (Santos, 2002b: 238). This would be the “cosmopolitan reason” that he defines as opposed to Western rationality (he calls this “indolent reason”), which is based on three sociological procedures: the sociology of absences, the sociology of emergence and the work of translation. Faced with the four forms of indolent reason (in Santos’s terminology: “impotent reason”, “arrogant reason”, “metonymic reason” and “proleptic reason”) which have transformed hegemonic interests in real knowledge – knowledge anointed with Truth – the only option is to consider an intellectual challenge with action. The sociology of absences seeks to identify the field of “credible” experiences in the present, in other words, empower them so they can be contrasted with hegemonic experiences, which not only broadens out the present but opens up new perspectives for the future. The sociology of emergences aims to “contract” the future that is predetermined in official knowledge and create “concrete plural possibilities that are simultaneously utopian and realistic” (Santos, 2002b: 254). But from the point of view of cosmopolitan reason, Santos identifies a basic task that can no longer be that of “identifying new totalities or adopting other meanings for social transformation” but that of “proposing new ways of considering those

164  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo totalities and of conceiving those meanings” (2002b: 261). In relation to the first issue, he finds that translation is the procedure that allows for mutual intelligibility among the experiences of the world, both available and possible, as revealed by the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences. It is a procedure that does not ascribe to any set of experiences, neither to the status of exclusive totality nor to the status of homogeneity of its parts. (Santos, 2002b: 262) The work of translation affects both knowledge and practices. In the first case, it takes the form of diatopic hermeneutics, whereas in the second it takes place among social practices and their agents. Translation, ultimately, is an effort to strengthen convergences and synergies from diversity and a counter-hegemonic impulse. Using the work of Walter Benjamin, we are going to specify some of the contents of the task of these translators. We shall also examine the difficulties arising from global translation. The task of the translator: rooted cosmopolitan and diasporic activists However good a translation may be, it can never have any significance as regards the original. But, thanks to its translatability, it stands in the most intimate connection to it. (Benjamin, [1923] 1999: 121) This statement by Benjamin refers to the importance of the distinction between the original and the translation. It is found in his classic text “The Task of the Translator” in which, among other issues, he takes a critical look at the relationship between the translator and the work to be translated and the distinction between translator and writer. Benjamin was translator for the French poet Baudelaire, and although the examples here refer to literary works, certain parallels can be drawn regarding the “task of the translator” in the field of knowledge and social practices. First, there is a question of the inspiration and motive that lead the translator to translate, in other words, the reason for translating. If we leave out the commercial aspect that puts profit first, the main motive for the literary translator should be the integration of many languages into one single language. This does not mean a goal towards homogeneity but a path to the intelligibility. In a similar way, the integration of people as a normative framework also marks out the horizon for the translator of practices and knowledge. Second, we are faced with the question of what to translate, where there is a convergence of two elements: the choice of what to translate and what to leave out of the translation. With respect to the first aspect, with both

Interregionalism from below  165 literary translations and translation of knowledge and social practices, such a choice passes through a filter of personal judgements, collective subjectivity and political decisions. Works that get translated are either well known and considered to be important or are translated for a certain end, just as the translation of known practices or knowledge in multicultural or intercultural “zones of contact” may contribute to their intelligibility. In this respect, a book is translated because a particular need is detected, and knowledge or practice because there is some deficiency or disagreement with the interpretation of these practices or knowledge. Nevertheless, there are always books, practices and knowledge that are not translated, either because they are not considered to be relevant or because they are unknown. Third, convergences and tensions appear between tasks. In the same way as a translator may be a writer (in fact, this frequently happens, as in the case of Benjamin himself), the translator of social practices may be, and usually is, a social activist, just as the translator of knowledge may be an intellectual who is in some way involved with that particular knowledge and its peoples. The recognition of social movements as process, through which knowledge is generated, modified and mobilized as well as the engagement of an intellectual/researcher with the subject of study translated has important methodological implications (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell, 2008). More relational-symmetrical approaches are being built, however, as indicated in Benjamin’s initial statement, they are different tasks in that ultimately, while the intention of the author of a work or a social actor is intuitive, that of the translator is derived. The fourth element is the usual dilemma between “fidelity” and “freedom”, or, in more precise terms, between “literality” (fidelity with respect to the word) and “adaptability” (freedom of reproduction while maintaining the original meaning). Of what value is fidelity to the translator of knowledge and/or practices if what he seeks is to reproduce meaning? If, in answer to the question “What is sumak kawai?”, the translator answers “living well in Quechua”, note how the fidelity of the translation of an isolated knowledge or practice is of little use for reflecting its meaning. The Benjaminian rupture consists of moving away from the theoretical focus in the translation of words and sentences to the translation of languages. Translation of knowledge and social practices implies a rupture that is no less ­i mportant, made manifest in the transition from assumption of the paradigm of ­Western modernity that silences experiences to the construction of a new epistemological and political-democratic imaginary. The core issue, however, perhaps lies in a last question: finding a suitable translator is not an easy task. Who are these potential translators? For Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002b), translators of knowledge and social practices must be cosmopolitan intellectuals, a proposal that is close to posterior theorizations, such as that of Tarrow (2005), who uses the term rooted cosmopolitan, coined by Appiah (1996), to define those activists or groups with flexible identities (typified by their inclusive character and emphasis on

166  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo diversity) and multiple references (various senses of belonging and militant activity in different groups). For Tarrow (2005: 29), the rooted cosmopolitan “mobilizes domestic and international resources and opportunities in order to meet certain demands and make advances on behalf of external actors, against external opponents, or to support common goals they have with transnational allies”. Transnational activists that fit the profile suggested by Tarrow would thus be rooted in specific national contexts, but immersed in anti-establishment political activities that introduce them to transnational contact networks and different types of collective action. Although there is certainly enough fertile ground in Tarrow’s definition to consider the profile of possible translators in the processes of transnational activism, it fails to explore another profile of an activist who might possibly operate as a translator: the activist who is not rooted in a specific national context but is rootless or has a multiplicity of trans-local affinities and multi-­ territorial identities. Recent literature on global social movements, and mainly in alter-globalization activists, argues that these activists are quite place-based in many of their thinking and actions (Escobar, 2001, 2008; Osterweil, 2005), charting a “globally emergent form of localized politics” (Gibson-Graham, 2005) and functioning as a “rooted network” (Rocheleau and Roth, 2007). This multiplicity of references goes against the methodological nationalism and the teleological view of scales in the study of transnational activism and describes activists who construct a sphere of political action without necessarily passing through the filter of the nation-state. However, most of these analyses are focused on largely territorialized social movements and not consider small organizations and social movements that in its own constitution operate and has a multiple identity divided into two or more places. In this respect, we could also talk of a “diasporic activist” with a political activism marked by dispersion, since it is produced in at least two places, possibly simultaneously; moreover, it is characterized by a specific political and social project within the framework of various territorialities. In the imaginary of diasporic activists, such projects are usually framed in the praxis of social movements that transform, or anti-establishment practices that help to generate an alternative imaginary of what their principles of connection or origin are. In this respect, they have a “diasporic identity”, a concept coined by Stuart Hall (1990) and widely used in cultural studies that may be highly valid for explanations by potential translators in transnational activism. As the anthropologists Soledad Vieitez and Mercedes Jabardo (2006: 183) point out, with this concept the British author alludes to “people who move between two or more worlds, with two or more languages, and multiple references, people who no longer have roots, only routes. And it is in the latter – the routes – that they meet each other”.2 Like rooted cosmopolitans, diasporic activists operate in transnational networks constructed through multiple references and flexible identities, although, unlike the first group, they do not have strong roots, but mainly routes. The immediate implication of this is that there is a more direct bond

Interregionalism from below  167 within transnational activism, without the intervention of the filter of a militancy rooted in the nation-state, as Sidney Tarrow proposes. Both activist profiles also converge in advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998) and are potential translators of practices and knowledge, connecting different realities from a variety of viewpoints, thereby enriching the process of translation of practices and knowledge. In the case, we are concerned with that of translators in an Ibero-­A merican context, we find that internationalist solidarity groups, support committees, associations and other similar groups are privileged translators of practices and knowledge. They are made up of both rooted cosmopolitans and diasporic activists; they enable counter-hegemonic regionalized globalization processes to be articulated in different parts of the world and they act as motivating agents that “translate” the social movements and peoples of Latin America in Spain and Portugal. Beyond the “charity market” and the structure of institutionalized cooperation, where a clear distinction has to be made between the actions involved and the “subjects of translation”, internationalist solidarity between peoples is all about projecting a transnational connection between social actors in which the cornerstone of connection is political solidarity. In the case of Ibero-America, as we shall try to show later on, these bonds are not only based on cultural affinity but also on sharing and opposing the influences of colonialism and Spanish and Portuguese coloniality towards Latin American countries. International solidarity committees on the Iberian Peninsula and bi-regional networks, like Enlazando Alternativas, are making it possible for Ibero-America to be seen not only a space of hegemonic representation but also as having an alternative imaginary as a space of counter-representation. The difficulties of global/regional translation The existence of processes of political protest at international level and of “global translators” is certainly not a new phenomenon; what is a new scenario is the double anniversary that falls this year, 2009, to celebrate the twenty years that have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 (an event that led, amongst other changes, to a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical map with the end of the bipolar world and an unprecedented opening up of capitalist expansion), and the ten years since the Seattle demonstrations in 1999 (these not only delayed the WTO summit but marked the sudden rise in the media of the anti-globalization movement and a renewed framework for action with a repertory of transnational protest between social movements). This new scenario of political and social protest at international and transnational levels has brought about a significant rupture with social theories of modernity and previous social practices with the incorporation in considerable numbers of a diversity of organizations at ideological, social, cultural and geographical level. “Translating” different epistemologies and

168  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo social practices in order to strengthen the counter-hegemonic character of these new collective actions at international level thus becomes a necessity as urgent as it is complex. The work of translators, whether as individuals (usually intellectuals or activists which flow smoothly between various national spaces) or in groups (such as solidarity or support committees) is beset with difficulties that need to be contextualized in the transformations experienced by supportive internationalism, as well as in the paradigmatic social crisis already mentioned. In recent decades, the movement away from “classical internationalism” to “new global solidarity” or “complex internationalism” (Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005) has formed part of a broad consensus among activists and in existing literature on the subject, despite many differences in the scope of emergent internationalist demonstrations of solidarity. There is frequently radical opposition to the “wrongs of the old” compared to the “virtuosities of the new” without any debate on how to use past experience to avoid mistakes or how to learn from narratives of the past (what recalls a similar duality of the debate on “new social movements” in the 1970s and 1980s). This significant rupture in the context of global solidarity does not mean a total rejection of former internationalism. Waterman (2006) makes a distinction between two fundamental internationalist movements: that of the working masses and the Socialist International of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the radical solidarity movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Despite being broad ranging, the advantage of Waterman’s distinction is that it does not simply compare one with the other in time and space but looks for answers and interconnections in the present more complex scenario of internationalist solidarity, in which the first movements “did not die out […]: they were consumed by the fires of nation statism, imperialism and consumer capitalism” (2006: 26). For the author, the solidary internationalism of the twenty-first century can and should have an alternative concept based on those very values of freedom, equality and solidarity from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provided that (1) the limits of the expansion of autonomy, authority and legitimacy of the state in the modern world are recognized; (2) they are related more to the transformation of global space than to the national dimension; (3) there is an acceptance of the multiplicity of global contradictions, existing themes and movements and actors involved; (4) the values of diversity, peace and care of the ecology are added in; (5) the interrelation of global utopias are stressed, in the sense of the imaginable human community and the need to civilize and challenge a capitalist world order that is a threat not so much to order itself as to the existence of the human race (2006: 26–30). In classical internationalist solidarism, the international almost always appeared in opposition to or in contrast with the national (Bringel, 2015). The solidary internationalism of the “Zapatista and Seattle generation”, however, breaks with this binary logic and incorporates a wider meaning of political

Interregionalism from below  169 solidarity that crosses the territoriality of the nation-state. Though it moves between the local and the global, it does not result in a new essentially binary opposition. In contemporary manifestations of solidary ­internationalism, there is a less rigid interaction between the national and the global. In practice, the slogan “Think globally, act locally” has an ­alternative, not only in “think locally and act globally” but also in the reflexive and dialectic interaction between both dimensions and horizons. In this respect, it is a scenario that changes shape with constant reconstruction. It is particularly interesting to observe how internationalist solidarity and the emergent transnational networks in the present context of neoliberal globalization and new regional maps operate. We could perhaps talk of regionalized or regional globalization. Since the beginning of the new century, resistance was marked in Latin America by the sudden rise of a new regional imaginary that is relatively more autonomous and potentially emancipatory, constructed largely through the shaping of transnational networks of social movements. Bringel and Falero have studied the structure of these networks in Latin America (Bringel and Falero, 2008; Falero, 2008), analysing the transnationalization of movements, such as those of the landless rural workers in Brazil, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) and the Uruguayan federation of mutually aided housing cooperatives, the Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas de Vivienda de Ayuda Mutua (FUCVAM). These have given shape to a “civil regional society”; however, much of the concept is disputed and even insufficient. It is also the type of globalization that Santos (2001) talks about when he refers to the concept of “Our America”, which originated with Martí. He broadens its meaning towards a metaphoric and utopian horizon that includes the enunciation of a counter-hegemonic project to counter European-­A merican modernity, a “battleground” on which social organizations opposed to ­hegemonic globalization from both North and South converge.

Transnational networks of Ibero-American and Euro-Latin American solidarity: spaces of counter representation and interregionalism from below We shall explain briefly below how spaces of resistance to neoliberal globalization that use Ibero-American space as a reference to alternative potential have been constituted. To do this, we shall analyse two examples in the field of Ibero-American relations: the creation and operation of certain Internationalist Solidarity Committees in Spain and Portugal and of the bi-regional network Enlazando Alternativas, which brings together social organizations and movements from Latin America and Europe. In both cases, the role of these solidarity groups and transnational networks in the task of translating knowledge and social practices, and their contribution towards the generation of a space of potentially emancipatory counter-­representation will be discussed.

170  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo Solidarities and changes in interregional articulations With groups or committees of internationalist solidarity, the first challenge is to differentiate between the subjects of solidarity. Groups of solidarity are understood to be social movements that emerge based on a particular collective affinity and a set of shared beliefs with respect to a specific reality. Their aim is to defend these and bring them to public notice through group action, with high-profile demonstrations and protests that are fundamentally sectorial. They share flexible identities and operate in p ­ olycentric networks with other social movements and solidarity groups. With this definition, institutionalized solidarity organizations are excluded, as one of the main features that distinguish social movements is precisely their non-­ institutional character. This leads us to a second issue that is interrelated: the existence of different “waves” or “cycles” and demonstrations of internationalist solidarity in the Ibero-American setting. At least, three differentiated moments in particular can be identified. The first is related to the “classical internationalism” of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, that is, solidary action linked through states, with a totalizing vision of social change (the worker as a privileged revolutionary subject). The second moment in the Ibero-American context coincided with the various expressions in Spain, and to a lesser extent Portugal, of solidarity with revolutionary processes and social change in Central America in the 1980s, especially with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Since this moment, it is possible to observe a growing institutionalization of solidarity groups, the great majority of which became NGOs approximately a decade after the democratic transitions in post-Salazar Portugal and post-Franco Spain. The third moment of inflection begins with the fall of the wall of Berlin, but has as its founding epicentre the Zapatista uprising in 1994 in the Lacandona jungle of Chiapas, Mexico. This led to the formation of solidarity groups with renewed inspiration and scope. In Portugal and Spain, committees supporting Zapatistas and also Brazilian MST appeared (see Chapter 11). Instead of sympathizing with a project of national revolution, as in the previous period, the focus here was on solidarity with a specific social movement that condenses the aspiration for social change and inspires activists from around the world. This cycle of solidarities is the main focus of this chapter in the following pages, since it is here when we observe the beginning of interregionalism from below really done by the social movements themselves. It should be noted, however, that in recent years this pattern of interregional solidarity and articulation has been challenged by the emergence of a cycle of protest marked by a new “geopolitics of global indignation” (Bringel and Pleyers, 2017). The decentring of social movements, the leading role of individuals, the strong use of digital media characterize this moment, which is still unfolding, As a consequence, the previous forms of translation, mediation

Interregionalism from below  171 and diffusion are again challenged, as we can see in the next chapters of ­Cabezas-González and Brochner, and Bringel in this book. In view of these changes, a progressive “denationalization” of I­ beroAmerican solidarity can be observed: in the first stage, the connection was made via the nation-state and was based fundamentally on the nationalism versus internationalism dilemma, a good example of this being the different Internationals (socialist, communist, Trotskyist …) and the acceptance of these practices and discourses by groups and Latin American writers; in the second stage, the solidarity connection between the realities of Spain and Portugal and the struggles of Central America emerged from collective pressure by different groups and social movements. Although the link was no longer via the nation-state, revolutionary processes were nonetheless still strongly associated with national transformation, of the states of Nicaragua or Honduras, for example. The third stage, in turn, involved a break with the state-nation matrix as the feeling of unity with a specific social movement became incorporated into the collective subjectivity of new solidarity groups. Direct connection was made with the movement in question, with no expectation on the part of the groups of changing the world or establishing the path to follow; they simply hoped to change their world and spread new social practices and alternative rationalities, whether or not these were applicable to the social reality of the Global North. This trend has deepened in recent years with the new cycle of global indignation, although the relations between the regions appear more mediated by specific causes than by territorial movements and the dynamics of relation are given more by resonance and for a limited time than by the construction of face-to-face exchanges in converging spaces. The emergence of a new cycle does not mean, however, that the actors and practices of the previous moment have disappeared. Far from it. In this way, during their processes of internationalization, movements of significance in the Global South, as in the case of the Mexican Zapatistas or the Brazilian MST, receive tokens of solidarity from different sorts of organizations in the North and are still relevant to understand the networks that have been built around them, their limitations and possibilities. These range from NGOs to solidarity committees, diverse transnational networks of social organizations and even certain trade unions and progressive governments, although not all of these collectives operate as valid translators and neither are all of them qualified to carry out the work of translation. One of the direct consequences of this is that movements receiving solidarity are identified with this complex and varied network of social actors. Two cases of interregional resistances: Vía Campesina and Enlazando Alternativas In the case of the Brazilian MST, Bringel and Falero (2008) and Bringel, Landaluze and Barrera (2008) describe the supranational action of this

172  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo social giant at different levels: (1) articulation in transnational spaces and networks of organizations and peasant movements (as in the case of the Latin ­American Coordinating Committee of Rural Workers’ Organizations [Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones Campesinas or CLOC] at regional level, and the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina at global level); (2) greater articulation with other social organizations and movements (not necessarily peasant movements) in international campaigns and forums, for example, the WSF; (3) permanent cooperation with solidarity groups and support committees, mainly in European countries and the United States, based on internationalism and political solidarity with the movement; (4) politico-economic cooperation as required with social organizations (NGOs and social movements that do not necessarily involve peasants) and agents of international cooperation, both official and unofficial, in order to obtain a particular agreement or carry out a project and (5) relations as the need arises with political organizations and institutions. In this way, formal and informal and tactical and strategic alliances can be distinguished. These are basically transnational networks of peasant organizations, for the most part promoted by the MST itself, the CLOC being prominent at Latin American level, although there are also other movements and networks that go beyond the region as well as solidarity groups in the Global North. It is worth noting that although these groups are present in much of Europe, the United States, Canada and even Japan, they find their greatest expression in the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain alone, there are six (in Madrid, Barcelona, Cordoba, Asturias, Zaragoza and the Basque Country) as opposed to the usual one or, at best, two in other European countries. They also have a considerable presence in the United States. However, as a two-way process is involved for certain MST militants who visit the movement’s support committees in Spain, working with the Spanish organizations is easier and the results of this political solidarity are more efficient. Interviewed during her visit to Madrid in April 2009, the MST member Soraia Soriano remarked that the greater presence of MST support groups in Spain than in the rest of Europe and the world was due to a particular “cultural affinity”.3 Many of these networks arise from stories that are passed round and projects or trips by activists to discover the reality of the Brazilian MST. The creation of committees is fuelled as much by these narratives as by diagnosis of the need to establish direct links of solidarity through movements in a highly institutionalized and professional context, where “political solidarity” is transformed into “solidarity politics” and where “companion” becomes “counterpart”. The main work undertaken by solidarity groups is that of translation and the great training school is the brigades that are organized periodically. Thus, because of the specific sectorial nature of a militancy that acts for the benefit of “distant third parties” – and not the local or national interests that affect the activist involved – the members of these groups usually take part in other local or national social movements (rooted cosmopolitan) or in other transnational networks (diasporic

Interregionalism from below  173 activist). Whatever the case, as we shall show below, their actions help to project counter-hegemonic representations of Ibero-America, although they operate differently. The second example of an Ibero-American solidarity network is that of the bi-regional network Linking Alternatives [Enlazando Alternativas]. This was formally launched in May 2004 in Guadalajara, Mexico, in response to the Third Summit of Heads of State and Governments of the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean. It grew out of awareness that a response was needed from social organizations and movements in both Europe and Latin America to the neoliberal policies of the European Union and its commercial agenda, which were aimed at ensuring unconditional access to Latin American markets. As a result, an ambitious plan began to take shape to coordinate the social struggles of Europe and the people’s resistance of Latin American, with the aim of resisting neoliberalism and proposing alternative visions for both regions. As in the case of solidarity committees, the basic premise of this bi-­ regional network is political solidarity. The last two waves of solidary ­internationalism are also taken as a collective reference, going back to the dictatorships, national liberation movements and opposition to the official “500 years” celebrations, among other spaces of convergence. Nevertheless, Enlazando Alternativas has proposed going a step further and recreating bonds of solidarity in a global bi-regional context that responds to the challenges of today. There are some significant basic differences in the ­organizational format (network instead of committee), in the greater twoway element (solidarity is shown not only by Europe towards Latin America but also the other way round, through the involvement of organizations on both continents), and in the actors taking part (social movements, certain NGOs, peasant unions and organizations of indigenous people, women, migrants, ecological and human rights activists opposed to neoliberal globalization; though on occasion these may act on behalf of others, the main objective is to defend the rights and interests of those involved). Since it came into being in Guadalajara, the presence of the Enlazando Alternativas network has been at its most prominent at subsequent Summits of Heads of State and Governments of Europe, Latin America and the ­Caribbean (Vienna, 2006; Lima, 2008), where its protests and proposals have focused on free trade agreements, transnational corporations and ­alternative regional integration, together with topics like militarization, the criminalization of migration, foreign debt and the defence of public ­services. During the course of these “alternative summits”, the network organizes collective actions, such as marches and demonstrations, holds forums and workshops and offers cultural and artistic activities. It also holds audiences with the Permanent Court of the People, an initiative whose job is to give more prominence to, and define in terms of rights, all those situations in which there is no institutional recognition or response to mass violations of fundamental human rights, whether at national or international level.

174  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo In addition to symbolic participation at official summits, the Network had other agendas, taking action as needed in both regions, whether in alliance with other networks, such as “Seattle to Brussels” (S2B) in ­Europe or the “Continental Social Alliance” (ASC, in the Spanish acronym) in the ­A mericas, or with watchdog organizations whose job is to connect both realities.4 This is the case of the Observatory of Multinationals in Latin A ­ merica (OMAL) created in response to the need to denounce the socio-economic and environmental impact of multinational companies in Latin A ­ merica, particularly those with Spanish capital. While it sets out the need for NorthSouth denouncement, it also considers the possibility of establishing a more horizontal relationship of real cooperation, not between states but between peoples. Nevertheless, although this is a bi-regional ­network between ­Europe and Latin America, and not an Ibero-American network, it is evident that in Europe it is the Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Portuguese organizations that hold most weight. For example, of a total of fifty-five ­organizations involved in the Permanent Court of the People, which ­gathered together more than 8,000 people in hundred self-managed activities during the People’s Summit in Lima, forty-three were from Latin ­A merica and twelve from Europe; of the twelve, almost half (five) were Spanish, which goes some way towards reinforcing the theory of counter-hegemonic cultural affinity. Among the Latin American organizations, fifteen were accounted for by Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador (supporting the idea of geographical proximity at this kind of meeting), ten were from Brazil (confirming, beyond the continental dimension, the significant presence of Brazilian organizations in regional meetings, due largely to the impetus of the WSF), five were from Peru, who were hosting the meeting, and four had a Latin American dimension (reflecting the growing impact of transnational networks of movements and social organizations of a regional character). The remaining eleven were made up of one or two organizations from other countries, such as Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua and Mexico.

Conclusion The post-Cold War cycle of solidarities in the Ibero-American space, which ended with the world economic crises of 2007–2008 – when the “indignados” cycle began – expressed well the interregionalism from below that we try to put on the table in this book. This period is full of examples of c­ ounterhegemonic counter-representations of space and spatial practices that overtook the nation-states as references and arrived to the constitution of a space of solidarity with a specific social movement. Following this emergence of interregionalism from below, what is a hegemonic representation of space, the Ibero-American Community of Nations, increasingly coexists with an Ibero-American counter-space woven by the social organizations and movements of the two regions from the articulations of the Global South. The rise of the Ibero-American framework as a

Interregionalism from below  175 space of counter-representation – even before the beginning of the I­ beroAmerican summits in 1989 – with a greater alternative potential than other regions of the globe, where the convergence of different epistemological and colonial areas leads to confrontation, is due to the fact that, united by cultural affinity, it has achieved a broader framework of reciprocity and a more appropriate environment for the work of translation. The institutionalized General Ibero-American Secretariat is strictly the result of an agreement from above between Ibero-American political élites (see Chapter 3). As a forum of coordination, it allows Latin American states certain autonomy from the United States and in the case of the Iberian countries broadens their capacity for influence in the European Union. But the ordinary ranks of people hardly follow the Ibero-American summits. There is almost total unawareness of the existence of an international organization like the General Ibero-American Secretariat, and the Latin American part of Ibero-America is perceived either as a tourist paradise or as a source of cheap labour. In contrast, both in internationalist solidarity groups and the bi-regional network Enlazando Alternativas, we find a work of global translation that bears fruit and see the other face of Ibero-America. In both cases, rooted cosmopolitans and diasporic activists coexist, although in the first case translation is an end in itself (the search for intelligibility in the struggles of those movements they support). In the second, it is a means that is essential for any transnational action of mutual support (identifying what unites or divides and promoting unity out of the diversity of organizations that are deeply involved in both regions).

Notes 1 We use the concepts of Lefebvre’s (1991) spatial trialectic: “representation of space” to allude to hegemonic representations, “spatial practices” to allude to the various kinds of activities that shape social space, and the “space of representation” or, better still, of “counter-representation” to allude to representations that defy the dominant order. See Cairo (2006: 370–371) for an example of application. 2 We appreciate Enara Echart’s comment on the possibilities of exploring a profile for a rootless activist. 3 Interview realized on 16 and 17 April 2009. 4 For further information, see S2B and ASC web pages: www.s2bnetwork.org/ www.ash-has.org.

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176  Breno Bringel and Heriberto Cairo Bringel, Breno, and Falero, Alfredo (2008) “Redes transnacionais de movimentos sociais na América Latina e o desafio de uma nova construção socioterritorial.” Caderno CRH (Salvador, Bahía), vol. 21, no. 53, 269–288. Bringel, Breno, Landaluze, Jon, and Milena, Barrera (2008) “Solidaridades para el desarrollo. La política de ‘cooperación activista’ con el MST brasileño.” Revista Española de Desarrollo y Cooperación (Madrid), no. 22, 195–209. Bringel, Breno, and Pleyers, Geoffrey (eds.) (2017) Protesta e Indignación Global. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Cairo, Heriberto (2006) “‘Portugal is not a Small Country’: Maps and Propaganda in the Salazar Regime.” Geopolitics, vol. 11, no. 3, 367–395. Casas-Cortés, Maribel; Osterweil, Michal, and Powell, Dana (2008) “Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements.” ­Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 1, 17–58. Della Porta, Donatella, and Tarrow, Sidney (eds.) (2005) Transnational Protest and Global Activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littelefield Publishers. Escobar, Arturo (2001) “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization.” Political Geography, vol. 20, no. 2, 139–174. Escobar, Arturo (2008) Territories of Differences: Place, Life, Movements, Redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Falero, Alfredo (2008) “Desafíos teórico-metodológicos para el estudio de los movimientos sociales en América Latina.” In H. Cairo y G. de Sierra (eds.) América Latina, una y diversa: teorías y métodos para su análisis. San José de Costa Rica: Alma Mater/Universidad de Costa Rica/Universidad Complutense de Madrid/ Universidad de la República de Uruguay, 225–247. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2005) A Post-Capitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, Stuart (1990) “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In J. Rutherford (ed.) Identity, Community and Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 222–237. Keck, Margaret, and Sikkink, Kathryn (1998) Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Osterweil, Michal (2005) “Place-based Globalism: Theorizing the Global Justice Movement.” Development, vol. 48, no. 2, 23–28. Rocheleau, Dianne, and Roth, Robin (2007) “Rooted Networks, Relational Webs and Powers of Connection: Rethinking Human and Political Ecologies.” G ­ eoforum, vol. 38, no. 3, 433–437. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (1995) Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2001) “Nuestra América. Reinventando un paradigma subalterno de reconocimiento y redistribución.” Revista Chiapas, no. 12 [On line. Available at: www.revistachiapas.org/No12/ch12desousa.html. ­Accessed on: 18 May 2009]. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2002a) “Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity.” Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 9–43. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2002b) “Para uma sociologia das ausências e uma sociologia das emergências.” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, no. 63, 237–280. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2006) Reinventar la democracia, reinventar el Estado. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

Interregionalism from below  177 Tarrow, Sidney (2005) The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vieitez, María Soledad, and Jabardo, Mercedes (2006) “África subsahariana y diáspora africana: género, desarrollo, mujeres y feminismos.” In E. Echart and A. Santamaría (eds.) África en el horizonte: introducción a la realidad socioeconómica del África subsahariana. Madrid: Catarata, 150–171. Waterman, Peter (2006) Los nuevos tejidos nerviosos del internacionalismo y la ­solidaridad. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales UNMSM/ Programa de Estudios sobre Democracia y Transformación Global. Woods, Michael (2007) “Engaging the Global Countryside: Globalization, ­Hybridity and the Reconstitution of Rural Place.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 31, no. 4, 485–507.

10 The new cycle of women’s mobilizations between Latin America and Europe A feminist geopolitical perspective on interregionalism Almudena Cabezas González and Gabriela Pinheiro Machado Brochner Latin America and Europe beyond transnationalism On 8th March 2018, following the global time zones from Buenos Aires in the West to Fiji in the East, a massive wave of protest swept the streets throughout the world. Millions of women in more than 500 cities across the globe protested against violence and in favour of women’s rights. This massive demonstration was the culmination of a sustained period of activism initiated on 3 October 2016, with a large protest in Poland against the proposed total ban on abortion (Korolczuk, 2016), known as the “Black Protest; a Women’s strike”. A few days later on October 19, the NiUnaMenos movement in Argentina called for a national strike against femicidios, joined by other women’s and feminist movements in Latin America and Europe. 2017 began with the 21st January Women’s March, and by 8th March the women’s strike had impacted nearly 110 cities, becoming the largest mass protest in Latin America and Europe. In the process, the Internet combined with conventional means of mobilization. A large and rapid diffusion, internalization, externalization, appropriation, and reappropriation of ideas and methods were in play among Latin American and European women and feminists. On 20 January, the pussy March in the United States, “the March of Women” called for an international women’s strike on March 8. Female mass protest spread globally, with the Spanish and Argentinian national mobilizations among the most prominent.1 In 2017, Chile moved towards decriminalizing abortion while citizens said “yes” in a referendum on abortion in Ireland in January 2018. The world was surprised by the strength of the “green handkerchief movement” in ­Argentina, and the subsequent feminist resistance to restricting abortions in Chile and the #BlackProtest movement in Poland (Hussein et al., 2018). The “feminist wave” shook the world and the headlines talked about the Year of Women. The current boom of transnational activism may respond to a new wave of internationalism, which considers that state policy is still in force

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  179 (Tarrow, 2005). This emergence can be explained as a response to the institutional actions of geopolitics in practice, so it might be useful to examine the feminist transnational reaction by taking into account its regional and interregional dimensions. As Dufour, Masson and Caouette (2010) argue, transnationalization is always located somewhere and is a process that can take a variety of forms (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Naples and Desai, 2002; McEwan, 2004). Therefore, the regional or interregional aspect is our main point of interest. If regions are “in process”, we examine the prominent roles played by women and feminist mobilizations between Latin America and Europe to go beyond the “Normative Power of Europe” (Vleuten, Eerdewijk and Roggeband, 2014), to consider non-state actors in the analysis of regionalism and interregionalism (Cairo and Bringel, 2010; Icaza, 2013). That implies not losing sight of the existence of regional identifications between Spanish and Latin American women’s and feminist organizations that respond to dynamics and processes of long-standing regionalization. The Ibero-­A merican space has existed for a long time (Cairo and Bringel, 2010; Cairo and Cabezas, 2010, 2011). Moreover, the financial and cooperative relations between Latin American and European women and feminist organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), political parties and so on, demonstrate a dense network and a praxis of interregionalism exemplified by Enlazando Alternativas and The Permanent People’s Tribunal (Icaza, 2015). Our reflection departs from the perspective of feminist geopolitics and is inspired by the debate about regionalism and transnationalism. Keeping in mind the need to not homogenize women, in order not to freeze the images, it is necessary to place the form of appropriation of collective actions that cross state borders in specific spatial contexts. That implies going beyond the region as a previous container or as an imperial gaze: ‘Collaboration’ and ‘transnationalism’ are terms that circulate widely, and probably too easily, within feminist scholarship. Both terms connote betweenness, a sense of exchange, instability, and movement, and rather than being easily circulated, perhaps their value lies in part in making us hesitate, reexamine, and reconsider. (Pratt et al., 2010: 65) Thinking in regional framework terms about the transnationalization of specific actions of women in different places (which had been appropriated by other women in diverse collectives around the world) can help us to deal with the limitations that a transnational perspective might present. The point here is not to “lose the specificities of its productions and its politics within particular spaces and sites […] in understanding or illuminating the various investments, contradictions, and relations of power embedded in diverse feminist projects, to which it is so intimately linked” (Bouchard et al., 2010: 206).

180  Almudena Cabezas González et al. This chapter addresses interregionalism by drawing on the experience of the Latin American-European feminist actions from 2014 to the global strike in 2018. We understand the region “where political engagement is increasingly transcending traditional territorial sites like city hall and parliamentary government and, instead, being choreographed through trans-territorial, topological connections, virtual public spheres, and rhizomatic traces of association” (MacLeod and Jones, 2007: 1179). The spatial perspective on transnationalism and regionalism analyse representations of space and its social implications from a feminist geopolitical perspective (Sharp, 1999; Hyndman, 2001; Gilmartin and Kofman, 2004). We understand the spatial representations as both gendered and embodied (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2004; Cabezas, 2012) because spatial representations and geographic imaginaries are also built from power relations, in which the representations and the “everyday geographies” are connected (Sharp, 2005: 37). To analyse the #NiUnaMenos and the 8M women’s strike in regional terms, we considered regionalization as a “political, fluid and diffuse process” (Cabezas, 2014: 208). Regional discourses are able to influence both power relations and meanings, as well as alter the scales of actions of social actors (Jelin, 2003). Therefore, considering the cultural and historical aspects of regionalism (Söderbaum and Shaw, 2003), we try to understand how the transnational actions came about in several Latin America and ­European countries as spaces of counter-representation (Moghadam, 2005), as resistances to different kinds of oppression. We begin from the Argentinian #NiUnaMenos movement, a feminist collective action that has modified the narratives around identities and geographical representations of Argentina over a number of years. In doing so, women from Latin America, but European countries too, contributed to changing the geopolitical imaginaries of the movement. Here, we will focus on the Spanish case, where the 8M strikes were very significant from 2016 to 2018. However, this is our first approach to a recent phenomenon and there is scarce data available (Pates, Logroño and Medina, 2017; Alamo et al., 2018; Laudano et al., 2018; Riley, 2018). Nonetheless, we focus on two Euro-Latin American Networks: the Federica Montseny Network (2014) and the Latin American Women’s Network in Spain (2012) to address the interplay between online and offline feminist spaces in order to understand informal interregionalism developing nowadays. Our approach to digital and situated ethnography is based on a monitoring of the collective actions of feminists in Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Spain and Uruguay. In order to obtain the data for the analysis, we draw on informal and formal conversations with participants, previous intensive fieldwork as well as manifestos and documents prepared by national and transnationalized actions, social network publications and so on. We complete the data with maps of cities and states to show participation rates in the International Women’s Strike in 2017 and 2018.

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  181 We acknowledge our position and place of knowledge as researchers, scholars and activists, and we recognize and value the knowledge of the women that organize and participate in these actions (Haraway, 1995). We were observers, participants and participant observers in many encounters, demonstrations and exhibitions, so we understand the social dynamics of power relations present in space related to the differences in identities that converge in women’s demonstrations (Oberhauser et al., 2018), even though intersectionality does not necessarily translate across all the women’s practices that we analysed here.

From #NIUNAMENOS to the international women’s strike As mentioned above, we analyse the 8th March of 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches as a regional practice between Latin America and Europe. First, we briefly approach the background related to “8M” from its origins in Latin America and Europe in order to go beyond how some particular actions are transnationalized. #NiUnaMenos emerged in Argentina as a response to recurring femicides. This was the name that was given to a mobilization to the National Congress in 2015 – which was replicated in different cities across the ­country – ­organized, in principle, by a group of journalists, activists and artists, but that grew when broad sectors of society made it its own and turned it into a collective campaign.2 As is known, the #NiUnaMenos is the reverse of “NiUnaMas” (Not one woman less, not one more death) slogan coined by Mexican poet and activist Susana Chávez Castillo during the 1990s to denounce femicides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Those campaigns promoted the concept of femicide that extends throughout the Latin American region, being a crime that European legislation has not defined (Pates, Logroño and Medina, 2017). In 2016, the #NiUnaMenos March was a big demonstration with feminist vindications: namely that gender-based violence should be addressed as a structural problem that concerns states and public administrations. As Laudano et al. (2018) underline, the success of 2016 came from a trajectory in collective actions of long-standing protest, which in the A ­ rgentinian case culminated in the largest mobilization in history against femicides and violence against women under the slogan ­#NiUnaMenos. Among other Latin American demonstrations in 2016, we should specifically ­h ighlight the dates of April 1 in Brazil against sexual aggression, April 24 in Mexico against femicides, June 3 in Argentina for ­#VivasNosQueremos, August 13 in Peru and the international commemorative events of November 25. Also, in European the November 25 demonstration protesting “Violence against Women” saw huge numbers attend ­rallies in Spain and Italy. The actions of #NiUnaMenos easily go beyond Argentinian borders, first in the Latin American region because they recognize themselves as Latin

182  Almudena Cabezas González et al. American and, second because women from other Latin American countries identify with the #NiUnaMenos struggle: We do want to insist, demand, ask, answer, because we do not want more victims of any kind. For that, #NosotrasParamos (#WeStop). And this request becomes regional: Bolivia, Chile, México, Peru, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador. In Latin America we are all together, because Latin America will be all Feminist. Against femicides and against the precarization of our lives. (Manifiesto Nosotras Paramos, October 19th, 2016) Latin American women and feminists belong to a specific place and share common characteristics, and sometimes might be represented from colonial eyes by the oppression and social inequalities that they confront. Here, we consider the rejection of the European political parties and institutions to specifically include the crime of femicide in European laws on gender violence; however, feminist autonomous organizations in Spain debated femicide from 2010 and 2011, and show a pattern of appropriation that explain the permanent influence and high connectivity among Ibero-American women and feminists.3 From Europe, Polish women went on a women’s strike on 3 October 2016 against the criminalization of abortion. Following their example, on 19th October, Argentinian women called for a national women’s strike to call attention to sexist violence and the consequences of domestic economic policies on women’s life. Other Latin American countries joined this initiative meanwhile in Europe, Spain joined, not only to support the Argentinian women but also to express the fact that they recognized themselves in their demands. European women, and especially those in Spain, have suffered the neoliberal policies introduced with the excuse of the global crisis, with setbacks in social justice and gender equity being one result (García, 2017). In the same month of October, Polish women called once more for a strike. At this time, the #NiUnaMenos strike’s call had already been followed in many places, mostly in America and Europe, as shown in the map (Figure 10.1). In Poland, women assembled a team to connect with other feminist collectives from all over the world. The women made contact with the #NiUnaMenos collective, and the Women’s International Strike Platform was launched as a result of the international articulation for specific actions. At the meeting to organize the Women’s March in the United States, it was decided that there would be a Women’s International Strike on 8th March 2017. The growth in the number of countries that joined the strike configured a new geographical representation, a new geopolitical imaginary, which had previously been invisible: a feminist one, in which women are visible, and have something to say. From the perspective of the Argentinian #NiUnaMenos movement, this was the beginning of a new form of women’s global organization: women responding to their exhaustion from different forms of gender oppression:

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  183

Figure 10.1  Places where the women’s strike of 2016 took place. Source: Colectivo #NiUnaMenos.

We are constituted as unexpected revolutionary subjects at a global level and we challenge all forms of exploitation, racism and cruelty from a feminist ethic that has as its centre a politics of life and not of sacrifice. For us, all bodies and all existences count. We put into practice here and now the world in which we want to live. (Manifiesto Llamamiento al Paro Internacional de Mujeres, 8th March 2017) It is possible to see that many of the countries that joined the call for the strike are in Latin America and Europe in 2017 (Figure 10.2). In Spain, the adhesion to a women’s strike in 2017 was huge, with Madrid being the European capital with the highest rates of participation both in the strike, and in the street march. This massive participation of Spanish women, and that greater closeness of women to the feminist movement, is due to the increase in violence to which women have been exposed in recent years. García (2017) explains the large participation of women in the strike by arguing that the increase in the number of women being killed – femicides – and the violence that women face are the result of austerity policies, which not only puts them in a more precarious position but also does not invest resources to prevent sexist violence.

184  Almudena Cabezas González et al.

Figure 10.2  Places where the women’s strike of 2017 took place. Source: 8M women’s strike platform.

In 2017, the strike established a period of 30 minutes, during working hours, in which women should leave their work places to meet each other in streets and squares in order to read manifestos and protest. Many women were not able to attend the strike because of their precarious work position, but nonetheless, on this afternoon the feminist March in Madrid was the largest. The high level of participation enthused women to do continuous work and dialogue with other organizations and unions so that the strike would have greater support the following year, as well as to seek work guarantees for women who want to participate. Feminist activists started to work on the 2018 Women’s Strike five days later on 13th March 2017. Back in Latin America, following the global impact of the #NiUnaMenos campaign, the movement reaffirmed its role in the region and a willingness to go further and form an international feminist front. It is possible to see in their manifestos a constant scalar jump: they argue for “international feminism” and a regional articulation from Latin America while they also seek changes in State policies. They go beyond borders with a common demand to obtain more national support and therefore have more power to press government over a full feminist agenda. Therefore, we are interested not only in understanding how specific actions are transnationalized but also how they are re-signified in different places at a local level because as Violeta Barrientos remarked from #NiUnaMenos Perú: There is no international coordination among demonstrations in each country. In Peru the demands and actions are aimed at the State scale,

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  185 that is, once the action is appropriate by women, their work in each place. It is built on the local context and existing practices, although the regional idea is used as a discursive tool. (Casa de América, 2018) We can verify this affirmation in the case of the feminist strike in Madrid City and region. The local work of women was intense and continuous because in recent years women have been working on a broad range of issues, such as sexual assault, femicides, working conditions and abortion, as we explain later. In addition, the strike was organized in local, regional and national assemblies.4 Women have not only worked for the 8M strike but also to strengthen and expand the feminist struggle. The objective is to reach segments of society that do not feel included in the feminist and women’s movement. The participatory methodologies used by the feminist organizations and the strength of the online activism, and the interplay between both, partly explain the success of the feminist 2018 women’s strike in Spain.5 People ask where all these “organized women” had come from, since the strike was present in the small towns of the mountains and not only in the large neighbourhoods and the centre of the city. This was the case in other countries, too (Figure 10.3).

Figure 10.3  Places where the women’s strike of 2018 took place. Source: Colectivo #NiUnaMenos.

186  Almudena Cabezas González et al. On 2018, the feminist strike in Madrid was joined by autonomous collectives, women’s organizations, feminist assemblies and individuals. The leftwing parties also joined the call for a strike, although that participation was not without conflict because feminists did not want to be instrumentalized by them. This “neoliberal co-optation of collective politics” represented a significant challenge, and related issues about privilege and difference will be returned to below.

Interregionalism: from the Federica Montseny Network and Red Latinas to the green handkerchief movement In addition to the remarkable connections between the Polish #BlackProtest and the Argentine #NiunaMenos mobilizations, an example of informal feminist interregionalism between Europe and Latin America is the Red Federica Montseny – the Federica Montseny Network. This illustration will help us illuminate the cycle of activism around sexual and reproductive rights on both sides of the Atlantic between 2016 and 2018. The network emerged in Berlin in 2014 in response to the so-called ­Gallardón Law that sought to restrict access to abortion in Spain. Women from the Spanish state and residents in Europe and Latin America joined together individually or collectively to maintain the right of women to terminate pregnancy safely, legally and free. Some of the founding activists had been part of “feminisms 15M” and they joined what became known as “the Garnet Tide” too.6 Its name is a tribute to the minister in Spain who legislated for the right to abortion for Spanish women in 1936.7 The network launched a crowd founding campaign to finance support for women who needed it through Verkami (Figure 10.4), a platform widely used by feminist autonomous organizations,8 as well as a video campaign

Figure 10.4  “Utero tropical”: campaign No pasarán by Red Federica Montseny. Source: Photo by Verónica Losantos.

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  187 in different languages for 8th March 2014.9 The main nodes of the organization are in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Mexico, Central America and Uruguay, and its work is an affirmation that the largest post-15M mobilizations in Spain were feminist. First, however, we would like to explain briefly about the emerging context of the network. The big demonstration link to this movement involved a large march of thousands of feminists in Madrid on 1st February 2014. “The ­Freedom Train” demonstration was echoed in European cities, especially in France, Italy and the United Kingdom, although it also arrived to Dublin, ­Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. While 28th September is a global day of action, originated in Latin American to promote sexual and reproductive rights, Spanish activists joined the international campaign in 2009 at the same time as ­Uruguayan organizations were struggling to obtain the right to abortion under a “law of assumptions” proclaimed in 2012 (Cabezas and Bringel, 2015). On 23rd September 2014, the Spanish Government withdrew the draft of the Organic Law for “the Protection of the Conceived and the Rights of the Pregnant”, drawn up by the Ministry of Justice, Alberto Ruiz-­Gallardón, who announced his resignation. The 28 September march was held in celebration. Thousands of women danced in the rain in Madrid. During the speeches, a woman from El Salvador called for support for “Las 17”; a campaign to fight against the criminalization of women with obstetric complications in Central-America. The sorority with the Latin American compañeras was promoted by the Red Latinas and channelled through the Spanish State Feminist Coordination (Figure 10.5).

Figure 10.5  “My body, my rights: a global fight. Freedom for las 17”. Source: Red de Mujeres Latinoamericanas y Caribeñas en España.

188  Almudena Cabezas González et al. This issue of abortion became a lightning rod for conflict between conservatives and progressives all over the world. The Polish government sought for first time to ban the abortion in 2013 (Hussein et al., 2018). The Portuguese Government approved the project “For the right to be born” on July 2015, days before the closure of the Parliament for new elections, but the new progressive government overturned it. The conservative movement failed to limit and criminalize the right to abortion in Spain (2014), Portugal (2015) and Poland (2016), while in other countries with a strong Catholic influence, such as Chile and Ireland, there was progress in the pro-right to abortion legislation in 2017 and 2018, respectively.10 In any case, the feminist mass mobilizations have not yet achieved the levels seen in Argentina and Chile in 2018.

Interregionalism, sorority and connectivity: but “we are not equals” The #NiUnaMenos discourse has increasingly included other subjects “beyond women”, such as transgender and transvestite rights, and references to the struggle against colonialism and territorial issues have gained traction in statements and speeches. Questions of privilege and strategical sisterhood can be stressful as defining the connectivity that women have across the two regions is not simple; it is not all a matter of social networks, although this is a very useful and widely used tool. However, it can be said that the information among Spanish and Latin American women’s and feminist networks flows because of the long migratory history and relationships built through organizations and developmental cooperation projects. In ­Diasporas, these flows of information and exchange are more visible. One good example is the case of the Red Federica Montseny as well the Red de Mujeres Latinoamericanas y Caribeñas en España (Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Network in Spain). The Red Latinas is formed by eleven organizations and women that articulate Latin American and Caribbean women throughout Spain.11 Specifically, the Network is a support space for migrant women as well as a way to claim and defend their rights (Red Latinas, 2018). As a feminist organization, it focuses on the rights of migrant women to live free of violence, denouncing its various forms such as the fact that Spain did not sign the 189 ILO Convention that regulates domestic work. The Network is defined as a feminist and political movement; as they state, “Our condition of transboundary beings (Anzaldúa, 2004) places us in a place (or not a place) that is a condition of possibility in an authoritative word” (Red ­L atinas, n.d.). The authors have shared the process of formation and consolidation of the network with different roles since 2012.12 The Red Latinas find discursive cohesion around the representation of space from the Latin A ­ merica region. They are clear about their place of enunciation (their situated

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  189 knowledge). They come from Latin America: “And because we recognize ourselves in the Latin American and Afro-descendant struggles: we emphasize the protagonism of women in the Community struggles for life and territories” (Manifesto 8M Red Latinas, 2018). In this sense, as Latinas that suffer specific forms of oppression and, as such, they have established a boundary with European women, pointing out that their reality is different. So, place matters. Therefore, the Red Latinas states they struggle together with the S ­ panish feminist movement to overcome inequalities and promote social change. They share the objective of living “life in the centre”, a Spanish cultural translation of the Andean Buen Vivir or Sumak Kasai:13 In several meetings in Latin America and the Caribbean it was proposed to unify the 8M march with the violet colour that identifies feminism, to make this tide visible and to promote with this common gesture the effective hours of strike. We know that international coordination is already underway. We have the challenge of converging on the common measure of unemployment that creates unusual alliances. We build this coordination in social networks and body to body, in assembly and in the street. Two months left for 8M. This is not a regressive time, it is a time for insubordination. (Manifiesto “2 meses para el 8M: El tiempo de rebelion”, 8th January 2018) Although the 2018 women’s strike in Spain was amazing, “racialized women” made their displeasure known. They did not feel included. They criticized “European white feminism”, which makes the reality of other women invisible both by class and by race. The Spanish feminist movement was accused of not including migrant and racialized bodies, and of not understanding that not all women suffer the same kind of oppressions (Afrofeminas Manifesto, 201814). The critics highlighted that the 8M strike was designed for those who were in a privileged situation over others. As Fluri points out, Different experiences of time and space by individuals and groups have been further mitigated by their inclusion in, or exclusion from, spaces based on a variety of social-political factors. Some of these social-­ political factors are based on features of identity such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. Identity politics are further manifested spatially through individuals and group engagements with political participation, or have been marginalized from political participation. (Fluri, 2018: 140) We agree that the emergence of tensions in contemporary feminism allows space to be opened up for an intersectional conversation that could be useful

190  Almudena Cabezas González et al. in re-establishing grounds for a collective feminist politics. ­However, lack of recognition of the ILO Convention 186 by the European states and the scarce mobilizations of feminists and women in the 30th March, I­ nternational Day of Domestic Workers, demonstrations in Europe, are huge opportunities to develop the strategic sisterhood. There are issues of privilege, difference and access in play (Baer, 2016: 18) to question the superiority of European feminist work and to take as an example the collective action and the experience of women of the South in their own places, and of the racialized and migrant women in Europe. This has been one of the first lessons of the #NiUnaMenos movement, to address difference to overcome simple pluralism. This conversation needs to be addressed in the case of Left-wing political parties too and, in their capacity in the case of European parties to learn from Latin American practices, as the autonomous feminists had done.

Towards a feminist geopolitical perspective of interregionalism The global campaign #NiUnaMenos has operated differently in diverse countries and has been appropriated in different ways in different places, making visible globally, regionally, nationally and locally the different forms of sexist violence to which women are exposed. Women and the feminist movement construct stories according to their identification and to their specific contexts (Cabezas and Revilla-Blanco, 2019). They are in contact through social networks but there is no “campaign coalition” that determines a common action. This was the case among Argentinian, Peruvian and Ecuadorian women during the #NiUnaMenos mobilizations (Casa de América, 2018). We stress here the differences with the previous cycle of protest characterized by the formation of transnational campaigns or coalitions (Cabezas and Bringel, 2015). The connective action combined with the traditional expression of social action emerged from a feminist cycle in which we could note the salience of young women’s support for the mobilizations. In this sense, in addition to having a strong tendency to intergenerational work, it is necessary to stress the large proportion of young women, and some men, who mobilized in the protest for the first time. While “millennial women” have been criticized for their reliance on digitally mediated action, low confidence or compromise with change, this new cycle prove their political effectivity when participants move from online discussion to street protest. Feminists with a long tradition of mobilization in Poland, Argentina and Spain euphorically expressed their surprise by the growing number of young women who participated in recent demonstrations. The same can be said about the fight for sexual and reproductive rights. There is not only explicit coordination but also huge and diverse modes of connectivity between Latin America and Europe while a cycle of transnationalization is embraced by conservative actors with legal litigation and mobilization over abortion (Yamin, Datta and Andion, 2017).15

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  191 Another noteworthy issue has to do with the regional geographical imaginaries. The Latin American women and feminists mobilized by identifying themselves regionally and specifying characteristics of their particular context. The region could be Latin America or, in the ­Spanish context, the Ibero-American identification as a political opportunity structure. In this line, we would argue that women are building a new imaginary because they have become a reference for other women’s movements; it is not Latin American only but a fluid interregional movement. In this sense, we notice that beyond the regionalization and transnationalization of practices and demands, the singularity of each place takes precedence and even though the organizations work using a discourse that has an implicit and explicit geographical imaginary of region, their own context and demands define the actions, and accept the particularities. And maybe this is why this new feminist geographical imaginary of interregionalism works out because they manage to work locally with regional demands, and vice versa. By putting on the table a new imaginary these women are also challenging the traditional gendered and embodied spatial power relations. We stop seeing the white Western woman as the example to follow and instead take the experience of women of the South in their own places, and of the racialized and migrant women in Europe as examples to follow. They have not only shown solidarity and sorority but also they are transforming their demands into interregional and global vindications. They share vindications within a large spectrum that goes from better life conditions and rights (such as equal salary demands) to the fight against sexist violence and the right to abortion. The interregional feminist networks between Latin American and European activist are as relevant as the online spaces. The interplay between both appears to be crucial to transcend the neoliberal attempt to deny the Century of Women.

Notes 1 TeleSur, the South American television channel shown world feminist massive demonstrations in ConGénero (WithGender) programme [Online. Available at: https://videos.telesurtv.net/video/707199/congenero-707199/. Accessed on: 23 March 2018]. 2 #NiUnaMenos was unleashed by the brutal crime of Chiara Páez, a 14-year-old girl in Santa Fe, Argentina, in 2015. The following year, the Lucía Pérez crime led to the #NiunaMenos march. 3 The holding of the Diálogos Consonantes meetings in Madrid in 2012 was an example of the high density of connections within the women’s movement [Online. Available at: http://www.dialogosconsonantes.org/Vagenda.pdf. Accessed on: 12 February 2018]. 4 The organization follows the participatory scheme created to prepare the CEDAW’s Spanish Shadow Report, with regional and national meetings in 2014. 5 Due to space restrictions, it is not possible to detail here the importance of digital social networks and hashtags such as #Metoo and #YesAllWoman that help

192  Almudena Cabezas González et al. explain the strength of online feminist activism, or the forms that popfeminism adopts in line with the works of Baer (2016) and Korolczuk (2016). 6 To deal with the crisis, different tendencies emerged within the Spanish state linked to sectoral struggles: a “white tide of health”, a “green tide of education” and so on. The “garnet tide of emigrants” brings together Spanish who have been forced to leave the country in search of future. Garnet is the colour of the Spanish passport. 7 Federica Montseny was a Spanish anarchist, intellectual and Minister of Health during the Spanish Revolution of 1936. She was the first women to be a minister in Western Europe. 8 Gil (2011) explains the complex constitution and diversification of feminism during last decades in Spain. Chapter one is about autonomous versus institutionalization dynamics. 9 For example, video “Say no to the new abortion law in Spain” [On line. Available at: https://vimeo.com/88162414. Accessed on: 24 June 2018]. 10 Blofield and Ewig (2017) argue that terminology is critical to understanding abortion policy in Latin America: full legalization in Uruguay, successful humanitarian liberalization in Chile, failed humanitarian liberalization in Ecuador, and absolute prohibition in Nicaragua. They conclude that a leftist government is a necessary condition for abortion policy liberalization, but the precise type of leftist party could be crucial to understanding it. 11 The organizations that are part of the Red Latinas can be found here: http:// redlatinas.blogspot.com/p/quienes-somos.html. Accessed on: 6 March 2018. 12 Thanks you to Tatiana Retamozo and Eveling Delfin for introducing us. 13 See Pérez Orozco (2014) for a re-vision of this cultural translation from the feminist economy. 14 Afroféminas is an online feminist collective of afro black Hispanic women. See https://afrofeminas.com/. Accessed on: 12 October 2018. 15 There, “conspiracy” and the invented “gender ideology” are the terminology to organize both (Viveros Vigoya and Rodríguez Rondón, 2017).

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194  Almudena Cabezas González et al. Haraway, Donna J. (1995) Ciencia, Cyborgs y mujeres. La reinvención de la naturaleza. Madrid: Cátedra. Hussein, Julia; Cottingham, Jane; Nowicka, Wanda and Kismodi, Eszter (2018) “Abortion in Poland: Politics, Progression and Regression.” Reproductive Health Matters, vol. 26, no. 52, 14–17. Hyndman, Jennifer (2001) “Towards a Feminist Geopolitics.” The Canadian Geographer, vol. 45, no. 2, 210–222. Hyndman, Jennifer (2004) “Mind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography through Geopolitics.” Political Geography, vol. 23, no. 3, 307–322. Icaza, Rosalba (2013) “Global Europe, Guilty! Contesting European Neoliberal Governance for Latin America and the Caribbean.” In W. Hout (ed.) EU Strategies on Governance Reform: Between Development and State-building (ThirdWorlds) Abingdon: Routledge, 121–138. Icaza, Rosalba (2015) “The Permanent People’s Tribunals and Indigenous People’s Struggles in Mexico: Between Coloniality and Epistemic Justice?” Palgrave Communications, vol. 1, no. 20, 1–10. Jelin, Elisabeth (ed.) (2003) Más allá de la nación: Las escalas múltiples de los movimientos sociales. Buenos Aires: Zorzal. Keck, Margaret, and Sikkink, Kathryn (1998) Activists beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Korolczuk, Elzbieta (2016) “Explaining Mass Protest against Abortion Ban in Poland: The Power of Connectivity Action.” Zoon Politikon, vol. 7, 91–113. Laudano, Claudia; Aracri, Alejandra; Colanzi, Irma, and Balbuena, Yamila (2018) “Nosotras movemos el mundo, ahora lo paramos. Reflexiones en torno al paro internacional de mujeres en la plata.” Tema de Mujeres, vol. 14, no. 14, 18–37. MacLeod, Gordon, and Jones, Martin (2007) “Territorial, Scalar, Networked, Connected: In What Sense a ‘Regional World’?” Regional Studies, vol. 41, no. 9, 1177–1191. McEwan, Cheryl (2004) “Transnationalism.” In N. Johnson, R. Schein and J. ­Duncan (eds.) Companion of Cultural Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, 499–512. Moghadam, Valentine (2005) Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Naples, Nancy, and Desai, Manosha (eds.) (2002) Women’s Activism and Globalization. Linking Local Struggle and Transnational Politics. Abingdon: Routledge. Oberhauser, Ann M.; Fluri, Jennifer L.; Whitson, Risa, and Mollett, Sharlene (2018) Feminist Spaces. Gender and Geography in a Global Context. Abingdon: Routledge. Pates, Giuliana; Logroño, Sol, and Medina, Darío (2017) “Discursividades y violencias: la (re)apropiación de la consigna #NiUnaMenos en Twitter.” Actas de Periodismo y Comunicación (La Plata: Universidad Nacional de La Plata), vol. 3, no. 1. [Online. Available at: https://perio.unlp.edu.ar/ojs/index.php/actas/article/ view/4416/3598. Accessed on: 25 May 2018]. Pérez Orozco, Amaia (2014) Subversión feminista de la economía. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Pratt, Geraldine; The Philippine Women Centre of BC, and Ugnayan NG Kabataang Pilipino SA Canada/The Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (2010) “Seeing beyond the State: Toward Transnational Feminist Organizing.” In A. L. Swarr and R. ­Nagar (eds.) Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis. Albany: SUNY Press, 65–86.

The new cycle of women’s mobilizations  195 Riley, Christina (2018) “The Affective Flux of Feminist Digital Collectives, or What Happened to Women’s March of 2017.” In J. Hunsinger and A. M. L. Klastrup (eds.) Second International Handbook of Internet Research. Dordrecht: Springer. Sharp, Joanne (1999) “Feminist Geopolitics.” In L. McDowel and J. Sharp (eds.) Feminist Glossary of human Geography. London: Arnold. Sharp, Joanne (2005) “Geography and Gender: Feminist Methodologies in Collaboration and in the Field.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 29, no. 3, 304–309. Söderbaum, Fredrik, and Shaw, Timothy (eds.) (2003) Theories of New Regionalism. A Palgrave Reader. Houndmills: Palgrave. Tarrow, Sidney (2005) The New Transnational activism. New York: Cambridge University. Viveros Vigoya, Mara, and Rodríguez Rondón, Manuel Alejandro (2017) “Hacer y Deshacer de la Ideología de Género.” Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad. Revista Latinoamericana, no. 27, 118–127. Vleuten, Anna van der; Eerdewijk, Anouka van, and Roggeband, Conny (eds.) (2014) Gender Equality Norms in Regional Governance. Transnational Dynamics in Europe, South America and Southern Africa. London: Palgrave-­McMillan. Yamin, Alicia Ely; Datta, Neil, and Andion, Ximena (2017) “Behind the Drama: The Roles of Transnational Actors in Legal Mobilization over Sexual and Reproductive Rights.” Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, vol. 19, no. 3, 533–570.

Manifestos ¿Cómo se fue tejiendo el Paro Internacional de las Mujeres 8M? (2018) [Online 3 March 2018. Available at: http://niunamenos.org.ar/redes/la-internacional/ mapa-8m/como-se-fue-tejiendo-el-paro-internacional-de-mujeres-8m/. Accessed on: 12 July 2018]. 3rd Manifesto. El grito en común!Vivas nos queremos! (2016) [Online 31 May 2016. Available at: http://niunamenos.org.ar/manifiestos/el-grito-en-comun-vivas-nosqueremos/. Accessed on: 21 September 2018]. Manifesto 19 de Octubre Nosotras Paramos (2016) [Online. Available at: http:// niunamenos.org.ar/manifiestos/nosotras-paramos/. Accessed on: 12 February 2018]. Manifesto Llamamiento al Paro Internacional de Mujeres del 8 de Marzo de 2017 (2017) [Online. Available at: http://niunamenos.org.ar/manifiestos/­llamamientoal-paro-internacional-de-mujeres-8-de-marzo-2017/. Accessed on: 21 S ­ eptember 2018]. Manifesto 8 ejes para el acto del 8M. ¿Por qué paramos? (2017) [Online 8 March 2017. Available at: http://niunamenos.org.ar/manifiestos/8-ejes-para-el-acto-8-mpor-que-paramos/. Accessed on: 12 October 2018]. Manifiesto 8M España (2018) [Online. Available at: http://hacialahuelgafeminista. org/manifiest-8m/. Accessed on: 23 September 2018]. Manifesto 2 meses para el #8M: El Tiempo de la Rebelión (2018) [Online 8 January 2018. Available at: http://niunamenos.org.ar/destacada-home/2-meses-para-el8m-el-tiempo-de-la-rebelion/. Accessed on: 21 September 2018].

196  Almudena Cabezas González et al. Manifesto 8M Red Latinas (2018) “Las mujeres inmigrantes paramos por que e­ stamos #hartas.” [Online. Available at: http://redlatinas.blogspot.com/2018/03/8-m-las-­ mujeres-inmigrantes-paramos.html. Accessed on: 16 February 2018]. Red Latinas (2018) [Online. Available at: http://redlatinas.blogspot.com/. Accessed on: 16 February 2018].Red Latinas (n.d.) “El derecho a una vida ­libre de ­violencias desde la perspectiva de la Red de Mujeres Latinoamericanas y ­Caribeñas en E ­ spaña.” [Online. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwp-­GKktzQtnWkwtbWY2d XZpZjA/view. Accessed on: 16 February 2018].

11 New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities Mexico inside Barcelona, from Zapatistas to Indignados Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel Introduction Latin America and Europe (or, more broadly, Latin America and the ­Caribbean and Eurasia) have a deep historical link in the connection of resistance and in the construction of practices of transnational solidarity. During modernity, there were many overlaps between both regions, not only on the colonial and imperial side and on the hegemonic representations of space and society but also in the context of social and political struggles. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we cannot understand the ­Haitian revolution without the French one. A century later, the Mexican revolution helps us to locate the Russian revolution more accurately. There were many relationships between these two revolutionary processes that marked the twentieth century and fed each other. Mexico was the first country in Latin America to recognize the Soviet Union. The exchanges at the artistic, cultural, educational and intellectual levels were intense. Beyond official perspectives and formal relations, activist solidarity and political internationalism have served as a gravitation field of many influences, but also of conflicts and differences, especially in a later context of strong ideological disputes and major instabilities at the international level. A lot has happened since then. European anarchists travelled to Latin America, contributing to political organization, mass agitation and popular education in several countries of the region. Latin American activists fought in the Spanish Civil War and in the French Resistance and many European militants were received as exiled in Latin America, merging themselves in struggles of those territories. The Cuban revolution, first, and the struggle of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua later, raised a broad wave of political solidarity in Europe. At the same time, “new” social movements displaced previously established actors, also connecting feminist and ecologists movements from both regions. Several other relevant critical events and developments could be mentioned. But near to the end of the last century, the demise of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of an era of “classic

198  Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel internationalism” and a way of building transnational connections and solidarities. While some saw this as the end of the world, the global hope of a new alternative horizon came once again from Mexico, this time from the Lacandon Jungle. With the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994 emerges a new imaginary of resistance that put together the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, connecting in other ways struggles from various parts of the world and leaving several lessons for the global left (Bringel, 2017). The first lesson: localized resistances are not necessarily local, articulating the struggle for territory with broader actions, scales and meanings. Second learning: internationalism is still very important today, but it has acquired new foundations. It no longer goes through the “Internationals” or necessarily through solidarity between national projects or with a State, but between struggles and concrete experiences that have even gone so far as to defy the contemporary State form, rethinking social change in this new historical moment. Third: history must be recovered not as something past, but in its potential to revitalize new glimpses of futures that articulate unity with diversity. Fourth: history did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall or with the collapse of the socialist field. This implies that there is nothing inevitable, not even neoliberal globalization. Fifth: the new dynamics of power in contemporary capitalist society is increasingly advancing in the substrate of the common and resistances must defend these collective goods, natural resources, humanity, diversity and dignity. Sixth: in the face of the failure of Western democracy and the growing mistrust of politics, one cannot confuse the refusal of the political class with the rejection of politics, which can always be reinvented. Seventh: resistance has been constantly reconfigured vis-à-vis geopolitical and societal transformations and this requires understanding these changes to understand the emerging forms of transnational solidarity. This is precisely the aim of this chapter: to analyse the new configurations in the forms of transnational solidarities related to social activism that connects Latin America and Europe from the emergence of Neozapatism to the present. More specifically, within what many have called “new internationalism” (Antentas, 2015) or “new transnational activism” (Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005), we identify two cycles of transnational solidarities linked to broader geopolitical reconfigurations. The first one is the Zapatista cycle of solidarity that persists for approximately a decade. This experience marked a generation of activists in Latin America and Europe at a time of search for the construction of alternatives to neoliberal globalization. The exhaustion of this cycle does not mean that the “Zapatista spirit” disappears altogether, but rather that movement ceases to be one of the main “interregional connectors” of social struggles and of alternative imaginaries and practices. On the activist level, a greater decentralization of struggles, the growth of thematic networks, a certain weariness of the anti-globalization movement as a global actor and a decline of the “progressive cycle” in Latin America

New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities  199 coincides, in the broader scenario, with the 2008–2009 financial crisis and a subsequent reorganization of the geopolitics of power and resistance. Since then, a cycle of indignados struggles has emerged. More individualized, viral and decentred, it is associated with a new “geopolitics of global outrage” (Bringel, 2015), in which the event seems to prevail instead of the process and the individual takes the place of the movement. The transition between these two cycles, and its vicissitudes, will be discussed from a specific case: the activism that connects Barcelona with the Mexican reality. Barcelona is known by many European and Latin ­A merican activists as the “Chiapas embassy” in Europe (El Lokal, 2012). This anecdote emerged at its peak mobilizations of solidarity with the Z ­ apatistas. In recent years, although the city has also experienced several mobilizations associated with “global indignation”, the Zapatista principles are still present in the activist political culture of the city and even served as inspiration for the platform Barcelona in Comú, which came to city government in 2015. It is hoped, therefore, that this case would serve as a ­background for a broader discussion on the new configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities and its consequences on forms of interregional connections between actors, practices and grammars. The chapter is divided into four parts, in addition to this introduction. First, the activist context of Barcelona and its nexus with Zapatistas are presented. Then, we seek to reconstruct the historical process that began in 1994 with the “Zapatista solidarity” until the emergence of the “indignados solidarity” in the post-economic crisis of 2008/2009, which is strengthened in 2011 with the 15M appearance in the Spanish state and with the Movement for Peace, Justice and Dignity in Mexico. Third, both cycles are compared, based on an analysis of the changes in transnational solidarities in these two periods. Finally, as a way of conclusion, we discuss some limits and possibilities of interregionalism from below in the current socio-­h istorical crossroads.

Barcelona as the Chiapas embassy in Europe and Neozapatism as an “interregional connector” Since its public emergence in the mid-1990s, Neozapatism has encouraged the construction of networks of transnational solidarity based on global spaces and events, ludic communication strategies and a pioneering Internet appropriation. In addition, it offered an open political conception based in the idea of “a world in which many worlds fit”. Its impact was global, but more intense in Latin America and Europe than in other regions of the world. Since then, it is possible to find in several localities in both regions a variety of collective actions and actors engaged with both the movement and Mexican reality, more generally. The case of Barcelona is emblematic. From the Zapatista uprising in 1994 to 2018, we have identified at least eighteen solidarity groups with Mexico

200  Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel active in different periods.1 Two of them – Collectiu de Solidaritat amb la Rebellió Zapatista de Barcelona (CSRZ) and Comisión de Solidaridad con los Pueblos Indígenas de la Casa de la Solidaridad – were founded in 1994. For around fifteen years, CSRZ has aggregate much of solidarity efforts with Chiapas. In 2005 and 2006, other spaces of articulation with Mexico began to emerge and, with the CSRZ dissolution in 2009, this picture goes even deeper. Regardless these changes, there is a “Zapatista grammar” that continues to act as an interregional connector between Catalan and Mexican reality and, more broadly, between activists from Latin America and Europe. Since 1994, its principles and symbols appear as an important nexus, which is mobilized by activists in different ways. The CSRZ was, during its existence, one of the main articulators of the solidarity with Chiapas in the continent. This means that Barcelona was one of the main entry points of Zapatism in ­Europe and, at the same time, one of the central vectors of exit, that is, mobility of European activists to Mexico, since hundreds of people travelled to Chiapas through articulations of the Catalan collectives, especially the CSRZ. In this process, Zapatistas groups have flourished throughout Europe, which are still organized within the EuroZapatista Network.2 Thus, the interregional dimension of activism is shaped in several directions. On the one hand, by building a connection between the different Zapatista solidarity groups, whether in spaces such as the “European Meeting of Zapatista Collectives” held periodically as a way of exchanging experiences (Leyva Solano, 2011), or through more everyday exchanges. Through these collectives, the Neo-Zapatism began to penetrate broader struggles, such as the anti-globalization movement in Europe, forging new practices and grammars in the struggle for “another Europe is possible”. Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias Turrión argued in his article “The Indians that invaded Europe” (2004) that the Zapatistas would have brought new inspiration to a whole generation of activists on the continent, and was the main reference for the emergence of tute Bianchi in Italy, a topic that reappears in his PhD thesis shortly afterwards. In contrast to the Europe of capital, wars and frontiers, solidarity with Zapatistas has also helped to strengthen the links between struggles and social movements within Europe, generating an alternative cartography of the continent. It is important to remember that, unlike other regions of the world, the World Social Forum has become strongly regionalized in Europe with the subsequent editions of the European S ­ ocial ­Forum, especially the meetings of Florence (2002), Paris (2003), London (2004) and Athens (2006). It is curious to note that a Latin American indigenous movement was one of the main protagonists of a European space of resistance. The indigenous from Chiapas were not there in person, but their experiences, practices and messages were, lived and translated by hundreds of ­European individuals and groups who had been in Mexico. On the other hand, knowing the Zapatista experience meant for many European activists to begin a broader contact with other struggles and

New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities  201 movements in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, including the Landless Movement in Brazil (Bringel, 2014; see also Chapter 9 in this book) and a diversity of peasant and indigenous struggles in Central America and the Andean region. Moreover, for the Catalan activists and for most of the ­Europeans engaged with Mexico, Zapatism appears as an interregional connector both personally (as an experience of life and activism that marked each of them, educating a political generation) and historically (as an actor who renewed the political scene in a moment of shutdown of previous struggles and conceptions). For many activists living in Barcelona, the emergence of the Zapatista cycle is understood as a possibility of renewal the political energies in the city: Zapatismo came to fill a gap of people who did not want to be in political parties, who did not want to be in unions, and we were no longer in anti-militarism.3 Then, the Zapatismo becomes a space where people come together. It was like fresh air, new air. I would say that more than specific projects, were the ideas, the words that began to be named. (Interview with Henrique Tudela, 38 years) In a more global level, an oldest activist, engaged in previous waves of transnational solidarity, also explains the emergence of Zapatismo in Barcelona as this new possibility at a time when old practices were dying. For him, in a period in which neoliberalism advanced and a previous generation of social movements was not an alternative anymore: In 1973 came the coup against Salvador Allende and many of us understood that the road to socialism was cut directly by the United States, by the capitalism that organizes a coup d’état. We put ourselves into a violent struggle. Then comes the transition in Spain and we understood that no, that the violent, semi-military plan … We do not have a solution either. The transition comes in Spain; in 1982 the socialist party wins, by absolute majority; then comes the epoch of disenchantment, as it was called here. Not only things do not change, but we go backwards. The Berlin Wall falls; there is almost no utopia. The great achievement of Zapatismo for me is to give us a new ideological body, but unlike those we had before, it is a body that moves our hear with the discourse and the word; it is no longer the rigorous, cold, Marxist analysis, but that puts all this burden of heart and the true word. (Interview with Toni Piñeiro, 60 years) The Zapatista articulation between practice and discourse appears as something important for many Catalan activists. Moreover, the Zapatista principles were not just abstract configurations. They began to be identified in local experiences in Barcelona, in libertarian and squat movements, in assemblies and in neighbourhoods. Another activist, Marta, relates that the Zapatista

202  Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel language becomes so embedded in the political culture of Barcelona that the sentences of the movement became normalized into everyday life: Zapatismo is part of the history, of the alternative culture of this city. People say sentences they do not know are originally from the ­Zapatistas. We have lived how Zapatismo has created a new language in this city. (Interview with Marta Chine, 40 years) In anarchist movements and autonomous libertarian experiences, this proximity is also claimed. In tune with Marta, Toni Piñeiro comments: “you can hear the Zapatista language in Can Batlló, in Can Vies,4 in the neighborhood”. In the same direction, a resident of a well-known squat called Can Masdeu, born in 2001 in the peak of the anti-globalization movement, compares the urban squats of Barcelona with the form of organization of Zapatista autonomy: For us, the squats and the occupation of urban space was the way to construct our autonomous municipalities in rebellion. Although we did not say that, their ideas are the ideas that inspired us to Can Masdeu, which inspired us to many other projects. The idea of autonomy, of self-government, of contact with land. (Interview with Henrique Tudela, 38 years) This same activist says that Zapatista influence was also present in the communication strategy with the neighbourhood and the local media. For him, until then, the squat movements had the tradition of being more closed and endogenous, with great difficulty in connecting with society (Cattaneo and Tudela, 2014), including the residents of their neighbourhoods. However, inspired by Zapatismo, Can Masdeu opened up the doors of the squat to the territory and to society, sharing land with neighbours, receiving schools to show experimentation with permaculture and dialoguing with the media. In short, these testimonies illustrate a broader trend: the collective perception that Zapatistas imaginaries, practices, grammars and principles became part of the activist political culture of Barcelona. These, in turn, merged into a pre-existing autonomist tradition, derived from anarchism, punk, squat movement and the popular athenaeums. In this mix, the local and the global are deeply intertwined and re-signifies in Barcelona the meanings of autonomy, which begins to acquire a more popular and less segmented sense (Cattaneo and Tudela, 2014).

From Zapatista solidarity to Indignados solidarity The recent history of solidarity with Mexico can be read from two main moments: the first, strongly driven and linked to the EZLN (1994–2006), will be called Zapatista solidarity. The second moment, of pluralization of

New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities  203 solidarity and dilution of EZLN influence, coincides at the turn of the last decade with a new cycle of protests in the Spanish state and in the world. This will be called the solidarity of indignation. We will briefly introduce each one of them and discuss their characteristics and specificities later on. The first moment includes the period from the armed uprising of the EZLN in early 1994 to La Otra Campaña in 2006, an EZNL attempt to ­expand and strengthen civil Zapatism on a national scale. During this period, Zapatismo was projected globally as the main reference of solidarity of the rest of the world with Mexico. A solid “transnational network of solidarity with Zapatism” (Rovira, 2009) was developed, based on a pattern of territorialized internationalization (Bringel, 2015). Around the slogan “against neoliberalism and for humanity”, the indigenous movement of Chiapas managed to unite a diversity of actors with distinct political perspectives, connected in a very globalized struggle. Email lists and web pages were essential tools for the diffusion, as well as for the organization of this network (Cleaver, 1998; Wolfson, 2012), the first expressive example of what was later defined as cyber-activism (Alcantara, 2015). The year 2006, however, represents a turning point for two main reasons: on the one hand, the emergence of other important mobilizations in Mexico, namely the Atenco massacre and the teachers’ struggle in Oaxaca (Ávila Delgado, 2015) that lead to solidarity beyond the Zapatista movement; and, on the other hand, the failure of the Otra Campaña initiative. With these episodes, the solidarity of the Zapatista collectives and sympathizers of the movement opens up to other realities of Mexico, although often still responding to the call of the EZLN. In addition, we must add to this picture the defeat of the political left, through fraudulent elections, which led not only to a “disarticulation” of the PRD project but also to the beginning of the Felipe Calderón, from the National Action Party (PAN), who takes over the presidency of Mexico (2006–2012) and begins the Drug War, with a militarized confrontation with drug trafficking. This approach leads to an exponential increase in the number of deaths, disappearances and violence rates, posing new challenges for Mexican social movements (Modonesi, 2013; Pleyers and Zepeda, 2017). The Mexican activist scenario has been reconfigured facing this new moment, but the changes were not restricted to Mexico. At the global level, the anti-­g lobalization movement was progressively shifting to more thematic spaces and networks, which replaced the broader convergences and the globally oriented protests, against the main symbols of capitalism and international institutions, such as World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Bringel and Echart, 2010; Pleyers, 2010). In this way, the decline of a global cycle of anti-globalization struggles, which had been largely articulated by Zapatismo, also implied the transformation of a form of solidarity with Mexico. This began to be articulated from more specific causes, events and episodes of violence than around the zapatista flag or anti-globalization.

204  Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel This scenario is joined by the global economic crisis that began in 2008, which has had important consequences in both Mexico and Barcelona. In the first case, some authors refer to Mexico as the “storm centre” of the capitalist crisis in Latin America (Holloway, 2017). This diagnosis is shared by other actors such as Trujillo (2010: 6): “Mexico was the Latin ­A merican country most affected by the crisis, with a decline of more than 7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2009 and with an approximate decrease of 10% in GDP per capita”. The consequences of the crisis in Mexico were aggravated by the dependence of the Mexican economy on the United States (80% of the country’s exports are destined to this country), even more accentuated since the NAFTA agreement. Crossing the Gulf of Mexico, on the other side of the Atlantic, the impacts of the global crisis were especially cruel in Southern Europe. In the case of the Spanish state, the implosion of a real estate bubble, a strong banking crisis and the rapid rise of unemployment and precariousness (especially of youth) produced a social and political crisis. It is against this backdrop that the “15M Movement” emerges in May 2011, acting as the initiator of a protest cycle of high intensity that was expanded from Madrid to various other localities. The dynamic of diffusion also moved from the initiating groups (such as Juventud Sin Futuro”, “Democracia Real Ya” and “Plataforma de los Afectados por las Hipotecas”) to large and heterogeneous sectors of society, including many individuals who were mobilizing for the first time. In Barcelona, the epicentre of public convergence was the forty-five-day occupation of Plaça Catalunya. The exit of the square with its commissions, debates and claims did not mean the end of the movement, but its passage to the neighbourhoods and territories. Several new collectives emerged linked to the right to housing, education and public health, as well as to specific causes. Thus, a new “geopolitics of global indignation” emerges in this context, marked by a cycle that was expanding globally (with the Arab Spring in North Africa, the 15M in the Spanish state, Occupy Wall Street in the United States, the revolt of Taksim Square in Turkey, the June Journeys in Brazil, among others), but whose protests were directed much less to global symbols and more to national governments, usually challenging the direct consequences of the crisis in their respective countries (Gerbaudo, 2012; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013; Bringel and Pleyers, 2019). At the heart of this process, transnational solidarity and, in particular, solidarity with Mexico is reconfigured. This wave of the solidarity of indignation is characterized by a greater decentring of internationalist solidarity, mobilized in a viral way. This process overflows already existing and established social movements and occurs with a certain independence of zapatismo, although without totally breaking with its influence. In addition to the Campaign for Peace, Justice and Dignity in 2011, initially convened by the poet Javier Sicilia after the murder of his son, which made visible the various networks and actors against State violence and the Drug War (Azaola, 2012), two other events

New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities  205 also gained prominence: university movement #Yosoy132 (Treré, 2015) in 2012 and actions against the disappearance of forty-three students of a ­Normal Rural School in Ayotzinapa (2014). Unlike Zapatista solidarity, the solidarity that is globalized in this second moment is more conjunctural and ephemeral. It responds to events or mobilizations in a reactive way, rather than arising from affinity with a political project (the Zapatista one or otherwise). The initial impulse is the indignation evoked by an event – usually repression, state violence or the murder of activists – without necessarily generate a direct articulation with the people affected by these multiple forms of violence.

Changes in transnational solidarities: comparing two cycles If we continue to analyse the Zapatista solidarity cycle in contrast to the solidarity of the indignation, we can observe the dynamics of reconfiguration of activism over time, as well as some of the major changes in the way transnational solidarities are constructed. Let’s consider four main variables: the substrate of solidarity, the composition and structure of solidarity networks, repertoires of action and communicative strategies, and finally the construction of scales of articulation and connection scales. The first element, the substrate of solidarities, includes the key topics of actions and introduces the social and geopolitical context that allows the generation of slogans and the construction of Euro-Latin American – or, more specifically, Catalan-Mexicans – frameworks of mobilization. In the case of Zapatista solidarities, the main backdrop was the struggle against neoliberal globalization and humanity at a time of hegemony of the “there is no alternative” discourse. Indeed, the eruption of the EZLN on 1 January 1994 (implementation date of NAFTA) was very symbolic and gave hope to a new generation of activists from Latin America and the world. In a time of crisis of the traditional left-wing references after the Cold War, the echoes of territorial autonomy, self-government, counter-power and a proposal to “Lead by Obeying” (Mandar Obedeciendo) and “change the world without taking power” (Cambiar el Mundo sin Tomar el Poder) contributed to revitalize autonomism, at the same time that the idea of “another world is possible” converged with the anti-globalization movement and the World Social Forum. In contrast to this proactive horizon of hope of the Zapatista era, in the cycle of indignation, the political system as a whole is challenged in a scenario of deepening inequalities and violence in Mexico and the world. In this new moment, the transnational solidarities built with the Mexican territories were less motivated by a shared conception of social change and more by the urgency to react to an unbearable and unacceptable scenario. “No more blood” (No más sangre) and “It was the State” (Fue el Estado) are some of the many slogans that refer to the centrality of denunciation caused by a “shock” (Bizberg, 2015).

206  Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel In terms of composition and structure of solidarity networks, solidarity was built, in the Zapatista era, mainly in a direct relationship with territories. This was done through different levels of engagement and mediation of actors (Zapatista communities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil organizations, popular movements, etc.) and various devices (newspapers, websites, community radios and so on). As we have seen, in Barcelona and in various parts of Europe, dozens of committees and support groups to the Zapatista struggle were created. They were connected with the movement in different ways, but always trying to build a direct relationship and face-to-face meetings, even if there were also broader forms of mediation, such as the Zapatista Enlace. Although flexible and open, the transnational network had Zapatismo as a central node and articulator. Personal involvement and the freedom to support the movement individually existed, but this came out from a relationship with the Zapatista movement. In its turn, in the “age of indignation”, solidarity is produced mostly from events that impact society or events that mobilize thematically or directly individuals and collectives. Many groups are temporarily formed around these events, but there is no single movement that serves as an actor or space of aggregation. Although there are collectives, solidarity is forged mostly by the individual temporary attachment around a cause. As for repertoires of action and communicative strategies, there are some continuities. In both cycles, the campaigns of political pressure to the local authorities are a constant. Keeping the same repertoire over time may reinforce Tilly’s (1978) hypothesis that repertoires change very gradually. However, using the same repertoire at different places and moments does not mean that they are appropriated exactly in the same way. In the case of campaigns, there is, for example, a greater role of the international media in the recent cycle, while in the Zapatista cycle there was a greater rejection of conventional media and a constant search for the construction of ­counter-information from its own resources. However, several innovations can also be identified. The first cycle was marked by a more radical content of civil disobedience on the Internet and alternative communication, while in the cycle of indignation there is a massive use of corporate digital media, widely accessed by the non-­activist population, although there are “bubbles” created by the algorithms of these platforms. In addition to political solidarity, there was also an important economic and material solidarity, linked to the development of productive projects in indigenous communities, among other issues. This has often been maintained recently with digital campaigns of solidarity fundraising through the Internet, but without the centrality of the dimension of personal and territorial engagement, which involved, in general, physical displacement and participation in the construction of processes in a more permanent way. If this tête-à-tête involvement allowed the construction of affection, social bonds and more personal ties, it also restricted the focus to the activist field itself. This has opened up in the solidarity of indignation,

New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities  207 with digital press campaigns, such as the use of hashtags to gain visibility in digital social networks and in society. There is less face-to-face contact among solidarity groups, whose actions extend for more places, but with less duration in time. A “hashtag” or a “trending topic” often became an end in itself. Finally, this brings us to the construction of scales of articulation and connection. In the first case, solidarity has a territorial root in indigenous communities and is forged in linking these communities with the international networks of support to the Zapatistas, who, in turn, appropriate, adapt and translate Zapatismo to their own local realities. This feedback is constant and makes the politics of scales deeply relational, constantly articulating local, national, regional and global. On the other hand, in the solidarity of indignation, there is less connection with the communities and territories of Mexico. The production of scales is less associated with a scale of action, but mainly to a scale of meaning that attempts to connect, often symbolically, people with other realities, producing broader meanings.

Final notes: changing transnational solidarities and (de/re) regional constructions In one of the most suggestive works on the geopolitical dimension of transnational solidarity, Featherstone (2012) argues that the construction of these practices involves two processes: the connection of political imaginaries of different parts of the world and the aggregation of social and material arrangements (see also Featherstone, 2008). In the first case, the author refers to the connections of meanings, symbols and speeches between social and political actors. In the second, to the most visible part of solidarity, that is, the construction of efforts such as travel and meetings that enable its construction. Both dimensions are forged from particular contexts, located in trans-local exchange dynamics of affections, ideas, policies and materials. In this chapter, we have suggested that since the global crisis of capitalism and the emergence of the protests of indignation, there was a shift in the previous ways of connecting political imaginaries and generating aggregations of social and material arrangements. At present, the ways of linking different realities are faster but also more ephemeral. Digital social networks have gained centrality in connecting individuals and collectives, creating articulations that are often defined as “global”. But what is the meaning of the “global” today? In the Zapatista solidarity cycle, the global appeared in three main ways: as a framework for political enemies (transnational corporations, multinational institutions and various symbols of capitalism), as a scale of protest (actions against these same symbols in events with the physical participation of activists from dozens of countries) and as a horizon of social change (“another globalization is possible and necessary”). On the other hand, in the cycle of indignation, the global tends to appear mainly as the geographic

208  Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel scope of actions (simultaneity in different places) and as a mechanism of resonance (as a device that symbolically connects the actions located in different places). Digital media gain prominent role here. However, to grasp transnational solidarity only through digital social network analysis, as is often done today, without considering how it is built in the everyday lives of the actors, can lead us to beautiful, but little explanatory graphs of contemporary activism. Digital activism is an important part of today’s transnational solidarity, but we cannot restrict ourselves to that dimension. Some examples: behind some Facebook pages of solidarity groups with Mexico there is only one person, which would never be captured by data analysis software. On the other hand, there are a series of formal networks that connect Europe with Mexico with financial resources and modern web pages that in practical terms have little adherence among activists while other informal networks – more invisible to an external observer – are sometimes much more relevant for connecting transatlantic realities. Therefore, although the context of society’s digitalization and the widespread use of digital social networks in contemporary activism is increasingly important, it is still fundamental to understand solidarity in a multi-situated way and from direct contact with activists and territories. Following this path, what the authors of this chapter contact with these struggles tells us that there seems to have been a radicalization of the weight of individuals in the construction of transnational solidarities, as well as a multiplication of smaller collectivities that begin to compose a polyphony of messages where we previously had movements already decentred, but with greater capacity of aggregation. Still, following broader trends of contemporary activism, rather than political projects oriented towards a permanent future-oriented construction, there seems to be a “primacy of the present”, which combines contingent articulations and fleeting contacts with a sense of urgency action. This does not mean that the regional or interregional dimension has really been lost or that the emergence of a new cycle of protests completely takes the actors and repertoires of the previous cycle out of the picture. For example, taking into consideration the Mexican authorities’ lack of response to the Iguala Massacre, several groups engaged themselves in the organization of “Caravan 43”. In April and May 2015, a student who survived to the massacre, the father of one of the missing students, and a local human rights lawyer travelled to thirteen European countries denouncing and publicizing what had happened in Ayotzinapa. In each locality where they stopped, they had emotional meetings with local activists. In his passage through Madrid, Omar García, a student from Ayotnizapa, said, We have not come to the great Europe, “civilized and with kings” to give a fringe. We do not want solidarity from victims. We do not come to pity

New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities  209 you. Nor do we want to say that our struggle is more important than yours. We want to be part of an international network among equal people. (Madrid, May 7, 2015) In May and June of the same year, other relatives of missing persons and surviving students make up the South American Caravan, which travels through Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. In addition to online activism, and in a complementary way, the caravans allowed us to build an approximation between different realities based on personal exchange and experiences. In this process, the identification of convergent problems – but also of common enemies – reactivated a regional (Latin American) imaginary, when activists from Rio de Janeiro, Rosario or Guerrero perceive similar situations of state violence. Obviously, mere diagnosis is not enough to forge new transnational solidarity, but it may indicate a new beginning. In sum, regional and interregional relations always transform itself over time, acquiring new meanings that are characteristic of the different societal and geopolitical eras. The current scenario in Latin America and Europe critically challenges the forces of the social and political left. A unit of regional (or even interregional) resistance will hardly appears now with the form and strength it had at the beginning of the century. It will be up to the social movements of both regions to try to get out of the defensive and reactive logic of the current scenario. It will be up to all of us to follow this process of threat to democracy on both sides of the Atlantic, seeking to make visible the constructions of solidarity that transcend national borders and point to new articulations and horizons.

Notes 1 These are, in chronological order: [1994–2009] Collectiu de Solidaritat amb la Rebellió Zapatista de Barcelona (CSRZ); [1994–1996] Comisión de Solidaridad con los pueblos indígenas de la Casa de la Solidaridad; [2005–2010] Mexican@s en Resistencia; [2006–2009] Barricada Zapatista; [2009–2011] Grupo de Apoyo a la Zona Costa de Chiapas (GAZCOSTACHIS); [2009–] Associació ­Solidaria Cafè Rebeldía-Infoespai; [2009–] Susurros del México Olvidado, El Otro Grito; [2010–] L’Adhesiva, Espai de Trobada i acció; [2010–] Nuestra Aparente ­Rendición (NAR); [2011–2012] Movimiento de Ciudadanos de Mexicanos en Barcelona (MCMB); [2011–2012] Red Global por la Paz en México; [2012–2012] Yo soy 132 México Barcelona; [2012–] Bordamos por la Paz Barcelona; [2008–] Nomada sin Tópico/ Espiadimonis; [2013–2014] Encuentro Por Mex-Barcelona; [2014–] Raíces al aire; [2015–2017] Asemblea Aytozinapa Catalunya; [2016–] Taula Per Mèxic. 2 Available at: www.europazapatista.org/. Accessed on 9 December 2018. 3 Social movement present in several places of the Spanish State in the transition to democracy, linked to conscientious objection against compulsory military service. 4 Can Batlló and Can Vies are squats that serve as a self-managed cultural and social centre in the Sants neighbourhood of Barcelona.

210  Livia Alcantara and Breno Bringel

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New configurations in the geopolitics of transnational solidarities  211 Holloway, John (2017) “Prefacio.” In G. Pleyers and M. Zepeda (eds.) Méxicos en movimientos: Resistencias y alternativas. México: Porrua, 5–6. Iglesias Turrión, Pablo (2004) “Los indios que invadieron Europa: la influencia del EZLN en las formas de acción colectiva de los movimientos globales.” In X Encuentro de latinoamericanistas españoles “Identidad y multiculturalidad: la construcción de espacios iberoamericanos”. Universidad de Salamanca. [On line. Available at: https://eprints.ucm.es/37467/1/Los_Indios_que_invadieron_­Europa. pdf. Accessed on: 4 April 2019]. Leyva Solano, Xochitl (2011) “Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Neo-Zapatista Social Movement Networks.” In J. Sen and P. Waterman (eds.) Changing Worlds: Emerging World Movements and the World Social Forum. New Delhi: The Viveka Foundation, 161–182. Modonesi, Massimo (2013) “De la generación zapatista al #YoSoy132. Identidades y culturas políticas juveniles en México.” OSAL, no. 33, 155–170. Pleyers, Geoffrey (2010) Alterglobalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age. ­Cambridge: Polity Press. Pleyers, Geoffrey, and Zepeda, Manuel (eds.) (2017) México en movimientos. Resistencias y Alternativas. México: Porrua. Rovira, Guiomar (2009) Zapatistas sin Frontera. México: Era. Tilly, Charles (1978) From Mobilisation to Revolution. New York: Random House. Treré, Emiliano (2015) “Reclaiming, Proclaiming, and Maintaining Collective Identity in the #YoSoy132 Movement in Mexico: An Examination of Digital Frontstage and Backstage Activism through Social Media and Instant Messaging Platforms.” Information, Communication & Society, vol. 18, no. 8, 901–915. Wolfson, Todd (2012) “From the Zapatistas to Indymedia: Dialectics and Orthodoxy in Contemporary Social Movements.” Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 5, no. 2, 149–170.

Epilogue Latin Americanization of Europe: possibilities for a geopolitical pedagogical transformation Teivo Teivainen Returning to Finland after a few months of fieldwork in late 1991, I started feeling like I had seen the future in Peru. To be more exact, glimpses of some future scenarios were emerging in Finland. The existence of these scenarios had at least one implication on the global geopolitical order. This implication, for its part, could open new possibilities for a more equal pedagogical relationship between Europe and Latin America. To the extent, attributes normally associated with countries of the Global South become more visible in Europe, Europeans could learn to learn from the South. During the early 1990s, new forms of migration were becoming increasingly evident in Finland. The debate on the recently arrived Somalis, ­Russians and other others in Finland reminded me of earlier debates in Latin America on hybrid cultures (e.g. García Canclini, 1990) and mestizaje, and also of how encounters of cultures may imply both violence and creativity. One Peruvian experience that became useful in the Finnish debates on migration, where the focus was often on the negative aspects of clashes of cultures and the resulting racism, was the musical genre known as chicha in Peru. Chicha, and the related technocumbia sounds, mixed tropical rhythms that had an African element with traditional Andean music and were played with electric guitars made in East Asia. They had become popular in poor neighbourhoods of Lima, until the 1960s considered a relatively “white” city, where migrants from the Andes concentrated. Along with some friends, we initiated projects to use Finnish development cooperation funds not only to teach the Peruvians on how to become more modern in the European sense but also on learning from these neighbourhoods how migration can result in hybridization that enriches places where migrants arrive. Visits to Finland by the Peruvian chicha rock band La Sarita were part of a more general attempt to encourage Finns to learn from Latin America. Emerging phenomena in Finland that could resonate with earlier Latin American experiences was not limited to cultural hybridization. It was also about political economy, especially visible in heterogenization of labour relations and unification of economic policies vis-à-vis global finance.

214  Teivo Teivainen At the time, some of the structures of the Finnish welfare state were being questioned while unemployment increased drastically with a newly installed centre-right government. The result was a growing attention by Ministry of Labour and other actors to what was then called “grey economy” of labour relations, later conceptualized as one dimension of precarization of work. This bore resemblance with debates in Peru on what, from contrasting ideological standpoints, Aníbal Quijano (1998) studied as “popular economy” and Hernando de Soto (1986) called “informal sector”. At the University of Helsinki, students of my courses were sometimes given articles by these authors and asked to apply their theories to understanding current changes in Finnish labour markets. Another example of Finland becoming more like Latin America, rather than the reverse, was when the Finnish Minister of Finance stated in 1992 that his government’s new economic policy of austerity was to a significant extent caused by the conditionalities placed by foreign credit-rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. The emerging attention to the disciplinary power of transnational finance in Finland had various similarities with earlier debates on dependency and the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Latin America. Studying these debates suddenly became not simply an exercise to understand far-away Latin America but also helpful in explaining what was happening in Finland. Over the following years, some of these emerging tendencies grew stronger in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. One instance was when the IMF assumed a role in disciplining debt-ridden European countries such as Greece during the first years of the current decade. There were soon seminars in which the Greek government and various European social movements analysed the experiences of Latin American countries such as Argentina and Ecuador in dealing with foreign debt. Europeans were suddenly debating whether the Argentine debt default, or the Ecuadorean debt audit, would be an example to follow in the European debt crises. The pedagogical relationship between the two continents gained new nuances when at least some Europeans became eager to learn from Latin America. European social movements had been inspired by Latin America and the Global South also in earlier periods. In the 1960s and 1970s, the inspiration often came from revolutionary leaders such as Che Guevara, or Ho Chi Minh and Mahatma Gandhi to take examples of different ideological persuasions from other parts of the Global South. When the financial crisis hit Europe in 2008, the prospects for learning took a more structural turn. The ground of assumptions about European development was shaking in ways that helped Europeans to see in Latin America more general tendencies, and not simply romantic visions of individual leaders, that could be learned from. A contributing factor in this change was also that autonomist and anarchist tendencies, sceptical of vanguardist ideas of individual leadership, became more visible among European social movements.

Latin Americanization of Europe  215 In this chapter, I briefly explore how the European crisis can create opportunities for a more democratic relationship with the Global South. My focus will be on the pedagogical dimension of European-Latin American relations. I will refer to three dimensions of changes in Europe: precarization of labour, transnational debt discipline and cultural hybridization. These elements constitute examples of what I call Latin Americanization of Europe. Inspired by Aníbal Quijano, I will assume that the traditional conceptualization of non-Europeans as belonging to the past expresses a coloniality of power. My main argument is that the Latin Americanization of Europe opens a window of opportunity to break with one aspect of coloniality of power.

European lessons of Latin America The new momentum for learning from Latin America has focused both on understanding what happens in Europe and also on what kinds of examples from Latin America could be put into practice in Europe. One was the experience of orçamento participativo, the participatory budgeting practiced most famously in the South Brazilian city of Porto Alegre after the Workers’ Party PT started its long tenure in managing the municipal government in the late 1980s. Even if the initiators of participatory budgeting came mostly from a relatively radical left, including Trotskyist tendencies within the Workers’ Party, the experience drew admiration also from mainstream institutions such as the World Bank. When Porto Alegre became the birthplace of the World Social Forum and thousands of European activists visited the city in the forums held there in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2005, participatory budgeting got many new enthusiasts. Experiments inspired by the example of Porto Alegre were soon set up in various French and Italian cities. In Finland, the municipal government of Helsinki started a project of participatory budgeting in 2017. Even if the extent of the experiment was relatively modest, its Finnish initiators explicitly referred to Porto Alegre as their key source of inspiration. During the heyday of progressive governments in many parts of Latin America during the first fifteen years of the new millennium, the left front government of Uruguay was often outside the radar of European social movements that looked much more into Brazil, Venezuela or Bolivia. ­Recently, however, Uruguay has gained more attention. Its new cannabis laws, designed in 2013, have become an increasingly important reference in debates on drug law reform in Europe. Uruguay’s framework of including human rights considerations in attempts to reform international drug treaties will possibly remain an important milepost in attempts to move beyond prohibitionist drug policies also in Europe, even if there are also contrary tendencies at play. Uruguay’s energy transition towards renewable energy has also been recently highlighted as an experience the Europeans could learn from. Daniel Chávez (2018: 34) has argued that the role of the state in

216  Teivo Teivainen Uruguay’s, as well as Costa Rica’s, energy transition “could be invaluable in designing the next system in the United Kingdom”. As concerns about climate change have become increasingly important, among some European climate justice and de-growth movements there have been more references to the Andean concept of buen vivir, and various related concepts in Quechua and Aymara. Even if sometimes based on simplified idealization of noble life in the South, this phenomenon has also contributed to attempts to learn from Latin America and, in some cases, with Latin Americans. These changes in European attitudes should not be exaggerated or simplified. The question is not that the traditional schemes of unilinear development should be turned upside down and Latin America should now be seen as the future. It is rather that the idea of some countries and regions belonging, as territorial units, to the past or the future needs to be rejected. There is also nothing inevitable about the process, nor should it be assumed that learning from Latin America only means things that are desirable from progressive perspectives. A different kind of learning could be, to take a very recent example, provided by the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian presidential election of 2018. A victorious alliance between traditional centre-right politicians and new racist leaders and movements is something that many European political actors and analysts are studying at the moment of finishing this chapter. There are various European countries where traditional centre-right parties are facing the option of choosing between left-leaning alternatives and racist right-wingers, sometimes labelled under the analytically dubious term “populism”. When defining whether to opt for someone whose economic policies they like but who expresses racism the traditional “liberal” right has kept distance to, and a leftist alternative that combines respect for human rights with an economic policy the traditional right opposes, the victory of Bolsonaro might be one argument for choosing the former. A less speculative example of the fact that learning from Latin America fits many political persuasions was provided by the “Chicago Boys” of Chile who designed economic policies after the military coup in 1973 and later became an often-repeated reference for various ­European governments, most famously for Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. In some generic sense, there is a North-South divide also in Europe, as there are various kinds of internal divisions in the even more diverse Latin America. Contemporary cultural hybridization that results from migration is a different phenomenon in Finland, traditionally considered a relatively homogenous country during the latter part of the twentieth century, compared to France or the United Kingdom, with more significant populations from ex-colonies and elsewhere. Precarization of work is more tangible for Spanish youth than for Swedish labour unions. Disciplinary power of transnational finance in Greece is different from the German experience. Therefore, talking about Latin Americanization of Europe, one needs to be aware of the internal heterogeneity of both regions.

Latin Americanization of Europe  217

Pedagogical coloniality of geopolitics Most theories of development have traditionally assumed that in the relationship between places like Europe and Latin America, it is mostly the Latin Americans who might see glimpses of their possible futures when looking into Europe. This reinforces a pedagogical assumption in the geopolitical order between the two regions. If Europe represents the future, Europeans can have a legitimate-sounding reason to assume the role of advisors or teachers of the latecomers. This attitude can be observed in the way global institutions like the World Bank legitimize their unequal distribution of decision-making power, but as I will argue below it has also been present, for example, in relations between social movements or trade unions from Europe and Latin America. Some critical development scholars have for long time been questioning whether that kind of march towards Europeanization is possible, or even desirable, for countries of the South. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to Latin American scholars like Gustavo Esteva (1988) or Arturo Escobar (1992), the whole idea of development seemed suspect. Post-­structuralist insights by many others questioned various kinds of dichotomies traditionally employed to describe different territorial entities of the global geopolitical order. My attempt to conceptualize the idea that Europe could see glimpses of its future in Latin America, however, is not based on a wholesale rejection of all dichotomies. Influenced by the political economy of world-systems approaches, I see no need to reject categories like “core” and periphery”, or the difference between “poor” and “rich” countries. My attention is specifically on how the dichotomy between the already developed and the still developing implies a pedagogy of global power (Teivainen, 2003). In order to make the poor of the periphery more equal with the rich of the core, instead of rejecting the analytical usefulness of political economy of core-periphery relations, ceasing to treat the poor as child-like entities of the past can be a useful step both analytically and politically. Despite the fact that Europe is transforming in ways that suggest various analogies with the South, the world is not becoming flat. The presence of the IMF in those parts of the world that its key decision-makers over-represent, such as Europe, can never be fully analogous to its role in the South. My approach is not necessarily aimed at rejecting the concept of development as such, though it suggests a thorough rethinking of its meaning and scope. It is rather focused on the erroneous categories that frame development as a process that takes place within countries that are located in a linear time-space continuum. Analysing the mutual constitution of Latin America and Europe along a continuum of development, the ­pedagogy-of-global-power approach can be considered a form of critical geopolitics. It focuses on the pedagogical implications of the location of different entities in the global geopolitical order. Inspired by Víctor Raúl

218  Teivo Teivainen Haya de la Torre’s insights on historical space-time, the location needs to be understood not only in space but also in time. One part of the theoretical and political challenges we are facing in this book and more generally is about liberating global and transnational geopolitical approaches from the methodological nationalism and state-centrism of traditional geopolitics. This can be achieved, among other means, by considering social movements and transnational corporations as truly political actors. Another task for critical geopolitics, emphasized in this chapter, is about situating different entities and actors in the same world-historical time. This can be achieved by rejecting approaches that cling to assumptions about a linear scale of time in which some actors and entities belong to the past. Antonio Gramsci (1971) once noted that every relation of hegemony has an educational dimension. In world politics, the continuum of development provides a framework in which this dimension appears. Locating some countries and regions in an earlier time in history has often been used to legitimize political discourses that infantilize these countries and regions. If they are considered more child-like than their already developed, and thus more adult-like, counterparts, domination becomes more legitimate. The infantilizing tone is present not only in the discourse of the more obviously imperial nodes of global power but also in various well-­meaning approaches to development aid and global solidarity. In the Americas, an early example was the way Bartolomé de las Casas argued for a benevolent attitude towards the Indians during his debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550s. For las Casas, the Indians were a prime example of people ready to accept the teachings of Christ and other European norms, and thus they should be treated with more kindness and compassion than what was suggested by Sepúlveda, who believed in a more radical otherness of the ­Indians. While being an Indian under the norms dictated by las ­Casas would probably be preferable to the violent domination proposed by Sepúlveda, both expressed a colonial attitude towards the non-European other (e.g. Todorov, 1999). The existence of this kind of pedagogy of power still reproduces a colonial element in the relationship between Latin America and Europe. As stated by Aníbal Quijano (2000), who was one of the greatest theorists of Latin American debates on coloniality, the conceptualization of non-Europeans as belonging to the past is part of an ongoing practice of the coloniality of power. In this chapter, I intend to explore some windows of opportunity for the Latin Americanization of Europe might open for the task of decolonizing and democratizing some aspects of the relations and imageries that connect Latin America and Europe. Democracy may seem a grandiose term in the context of global geopolitics. I would like to suggest, however, that one of the effects of infantilization of (relatively) poor countries of the South is the low visibility of democracy as a norm that can be employed also to analyse and transform international

Latin Americanization of Europe  219 relations. To the extent the South consists of entities incapable to get their things in order, because of their lack of development, democracy loses some of its appeals in a manner analogous to how adults need to express authority vis-à-vis the underaged. This paternalist impulse to guide the others has present also in some forms of critical political economy since the times Karl Marx (2008) expressed his doubts about the underdeveloped entities, in his case the peasantry, as people that “cannot represent themselves”. Instead, as he said, “they must be represented”. A realistic analysis of practices of political representation in global and transnational geopolitics of today, especially but not only in global financial institutions, suggests that this paternalist impulse is still alive. One way to tackle it, analytically and politically, is to explore its pedagogical dimension. One example of the political implications of Latin Americanization of Europe can be found in transnational labour union interactions. Labour activists from Latin America, as well as elsewhere in the Global South, have started noting that their European counterparts seem slightly less patronizing than before the 2008 financial crisis and the precarization of labour in Europe. Some of the developmental arrogance that the Europeans used to display has toned down. One key dimension of this arrogance is the idea that in labour markets, as in most other things too, Europe somehow presents the likely or desired future that the southern unions need to prepare for. The idea of “Europe as developed” implies that the representatives of the developed north can emphasize their role as teachers within international institutions or transnational networks. The result is patronizing and contributes to imperial politics. The European economic crisis that started in 2008 expressed a small but significant crack in the foundations of the European developmental arrogance. Precarization of labour and other processes that used to be exclusively associated with the condition being a developing country have become increasingly evident in Europe. For trade unions, it means that the ­European labour markets no longer represent anything like a finished model. The ­European claim to being the already developed one is shaken by what I call Latin Americanization of Europe. These and similar examples open a theoretical and political space for a democratic pedagogy of global development and may also open possibilities for a less colonial cosmopolitanism.

Towards non-colonial cosmopolitanisms The term cosmopolitanism has been used and misused in many ways. One example was the Soviet campaign against ethnic Jews initiated by Stalin’s remarks on “rootless cosmopolitans” in 1946. From different and more recent perspectives, as demonstrated by Gurminder Bhambra (2015: 187), for many European scholars cosmopolitanism has become “entangled with neo-colonialism”. A “properly cosmopolitan Europe”, she suggests, “would

220  Teivo Teivainen be one which understood that its historical constitution in colonialism cannot be rendered to the past by denial of that past” (Bhambra, 2015: 201). In this chapter, the term cosmopolitan refers to an attitude that, in geopolitical contexts, includes being open to learn from the other and with the other. Two fallacies need to be contested in order to better enable European cosmopolitanism to confront its colonial and imperial inclinations. The fallacy of “Europe as developed” reproduces the colonial idea that Europe represents the future that expresses possible options for the less developed. For the purposes of this article, the main problem in this fallacy is not that it presents the European reality as a model that, if imitated by the global South, would be ecologically or otherwise destructive. This is, of course, a major concern. The problem I emphasize here, however, is that the fallacy presents the less developed as learners, as inherently childlike, who can see glimpses of their possible futures in the more developed European countries. The guiding role assumed by Europeans can include economic policies as defined in the international financial institutions in which the wealthbased system of rule is legitimized by this pedagogy. One example is the way the Finnish member of the World Bank’s Board of Directors answered my question about whether she intended to make any democratizing proposals about World Bank governance. In her response, such a democratization would be harmful for sexual and gender rights, since these were most advanced in countries like Finland. This reminded me of Gayatri Spivak’s (1988: 296) famous remark about “saving the brown women from brown men” as a justification of colonialism. The other fallacy of “Europe as Cosmos” is mostly about the relevance of the inside/outside boundary for political communities. There is a tendency within the resurgence of European cosmopolitan imagination to take the European Union as a model of post-national arrangements. This tendency has many flaws. The one I focus on here is that the European Union reproduces some of the key characteristics of territorial statehood. It has clearly demarcated boundaries vis-à-vis the other world. Therefore, in cosmopolitan approaches, Europe should not be used as a metonym for the world. Europe as an entity can certainly become more cosmopolitan, but cosmopolitan orders can never be constituted only within its boundaries. The European Union as an actor participates in many kinds of projects that explicitly aim at helping poorer areas of the Global South to advance human rights and democracy within their territories. Election observation missions are one example of these projects. At the same time, the E ­ uropean Union and its member countries, as well as many European non-state actors, actively participate in reproducing non-democratic governance of North-South relations. One of the reasons for the naturalization of this lack of congruence, or hypocrisy, can be located in the pedagogical assumption in which Europe constitutes a possible future for the others.

Latin Americanization of Europe  221 Learning from Latin America, and thus reforming the global pedagogy of power, should not imply a naïve belief in the Latin American originality of the experiences to be learned from. Some of the initiators of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre were influenced by what they had learned, via the writings of Marx and others, from the experience of the Paris ­Commune. Within the capitalist world-economy, ideas have always been flowing in multiple directions. At the same time, the dominant social forces of the core regions such as Europe have been able to generalize and reproduce the belief that their countries represent the future. One step in rejecting this belief consists of liberating our understanding of the world from territorial traps that compare different countries and regions as if they were essentially self-contained social systems, even if externally related to each other. This kind of methodological territorialism should be rejected or at least strongly qualified by an analysis of transnational relations that considers transborder flows of capital, people and ideas as constitutive elements of the world-system. Transnationalizing the territorial assumptions about the basic units of the world also helps to move beyond temporal assumptions that reproduce interstate and interregional coloniality. In this sense, spatiality and temporality can be regarded as two sides of the same colonial coin. A focus on the transnational connectivity of states and regions helps us understand that we all, or at least almost all, live in the same world-historical time and in the same world-system. This understanding alone would not make the material inequalities of the world disappear. By creating ground for less paternalistic and colonial attitudes, it would nevertheless open new possibilities for further transformations towards more democratic geopolitics.

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