The following is a guest post by Christina Fattore, a professor of political science at West Virginia University. Christina's research and teaching interests focus on international political economy, international organizations, and gender and international relations.
John Kerry's claim in November 2013 that the Monroe Doctrine is over drives right to the heart of my research, and I'm not sure if I actually buy it. On its surface, one could argue (like Slate's Joshua Keating did) that greater interdependence has helped the rise of regional leaders such as Brazil and Argentina. One could also say that these countries are looking elsewhere to build new economic relationships, specifically with China. However, looking past this handful of countries that have done so well in the Bretton Woods/Washington Consensus system, the negative effects of interdependence continue to influence the foreign policy decision-making of most of the region, particularly, trade policy. Disregarding Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, it's easy to see that formal trade ties with the US leads Latin American states to support the US agenda in the World Trade Organization (WTO).
I am currently in the midst of a book project on how Latin American overdependence on the US for trade and investment over the past century continues to affect their current behavior in the WTO. The Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) of the WTO has been dominated by the major powers, mainly, the EU and US. Underdeveloped countries mainly avoid the DSM due to a lack of legal capacity (the inability to staff an office with legal experts at WTO headquarters in Geneva or the lack of bureaucratic strength to build a strong trade dispute), the inability to identify and pursue illegal trade behaviors, and a fear of retaliation by the major powers. Basically, a country's internal limitations are to blame. If an underdeveloped country does not have the resources to participate in Geneva, they exclude themselves.
While I was investigating this trend, I discovered there was an external facet as to why underdeveloped states are less likely to participate in the DSM. I theorize that underdeveloped states depend on their large trading partners to represent their trade interests in Geneva. Mike Allison and I explored this trend in our 2013 article using the decade long "banana war" between the US and the European Union. Neither the US or the EU actually grow bananas for export; however, they are intricately involved due to investment in the area. This trade dispute originated with the adoption of the Common Market and the Lome Conventions, where the EU countries agreed to a preferential regime for bananas grown in former colonial holdings in the Asian, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) regions. However, US-headquartered banana grower Chiquita felt as though this preferential treatment of ACP bananas was hurting its market share, and therefore, turned to the US government to file a complaint against the EU. This is a clear example of major trade powers representing (or in a way, usurping) trade issues in underdeveloped regions as their own.
Latin America is the only region outside of Europe and North America where every single country has been involved in a trade dispute, either as a complainant, defendant, or a third party. This is mainly true because of the banana disputes, where many countries were involved as co-complainants or third parties, where the US took the lead. In a paper that I am presenting this week at the Political Economy of International Organizations conference, I tested hypotheses relating to how dependence on the US for trade and investment affects Latin American participation in the DSM. I found that Latin American states that have formal trade ties through a preferential trading arrangement with the US are less likely to target the US. This result falls along the lines of the previous literature, where smaller states fear retaliation as punishment for targeting a large trade partner. However, Latin American states were more likely to join a US-initiated dispute as a third party when the defendant was another large economy, specifically China or the EU. This supports my expectation that Latin American states support the US trade agenda due to the shadow of dependence due to trade relationships and investment.
While the Monroe Doctrine may be officially over, its effects continue to perpetuate. Latin American engagement in the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism is just one example of how the region continues to operate under the cloud of the negative effects of interdependence.
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