Compromisos en España

Member State Relations with Latin America

Policy-making towards Latin America has received very disparate levels of at- tention in the three countries under study. In the British case, it appears to be studiously ignored most of the time. While the UK has a vibrant Latin Amer- ican studies community – it has produced, for instance, Leslie Bethell’s care- fully edited seminal Cambridge History of Latin America in 11 volumes (Bethell 1984-2008) –, it does not frequently deal with British-Latin American relations. There are some exceptions that allow one to trace developments over time, at least to some extent (Bulmer-Thomas 1989b; Grugel and Kippin 2006; White-

head forthcoming). However, these contributions tend to be limited to short papers (Bulmer-Thomas 1989b) or chapters in edited volumes (Miller 2005; Grugel and Kippin 2006; Whitehead forthcoming 2012). Miller (2005: 34) notes the long decline of British foreign policy towards Latin America since the be- ginning of World War I and points out that nowadays, “[f]or most people in Britain [...] Latin America is a marginal region of unknowns and curiosities with its stereotypical generals and corrupt politicians, its niggling but skilful footballers, and increasingly, its salsa music.” (ibid.: 33). In other words, Latin America is studied by British academics and the British population is inter- ested in Latin American culture, but few deal with how their own country relates to the region in current affairs. As a consequence, only a few book- length analyses of British relations with the region exist, the most recent such contribution being Victor Bulmer-Thomas’s edited volume on Britain and Latin America: A Changing Relationship (Bulmer-Thomas 1989a). The sparsely popu- lated ranks of British-Latin American relations, however, give this investiga- tion the potential to provide unique and fresh insights.

In the case of Germany, the body of literature is more substantial, and provides helpful analyses in tracing the development of German policy to- wards Latin America over time up until the present day (e.g. von Gleich 1968; Mols 1984; Grabendorff 1993; Mols and Wagner 1994; Maihold 2008, 2010). There is thus a relatively solid stock of secondary literature to draw on in ana- lysing German foreign policy towards Latin America. The older studies can provide a historical background, while the more recent ones will be used to help assess the results of this investigation. However, similar to the British literature, the German body of research lacks a unified effort to systematically analyse the factors that drive policy-making towards Latin America. Often, the contributions take stock of the state of the relationship very thoroughly. They usually conclude that Latin America does not receive as much German atten- tion as it should, or the wrong kind, and make recommendations as to how things might be improved (e.g. Benecke et al. 1993; Maihold 2008). This is due to the fact that many of the studies are published as papers at think tanks or political foundations and are therefore set to have a normative component centred on how policy towards the region could be improved.

Both the British and the German bodies of literature on relations with Latin America suffer from the problem that Latin America is not a foreign policy priority for the respective countries. In the case of Britain, for instance, Gra- ham (1989: 52) comments that “few reasons have been found in Whitehall to pay anything other than sporadic attention to Latin America” since 1945. Like politicians, political scientists tend to be drawn to those policy areas that are ‘interesting’ and fast-moving. Special relationships and crisis regions are ana-

lysed in depth, while the more day-to-day aspects of foreign relations do not receive such coverage. This is unfortunate. After all, routine relations con- stitute a large share of most European countries’ interaction with the rest of the world. By looking at policy towards Latin America, this study therefore contributes to the analysis of an important aspect of foreign policy that is all too often ignored. For both Britain and Germany, literature dealing with these countries’ foreign policy in general will have to be taken into account in order to provide starting points and possibilities for cross-validation. That way, I will be able to provide additional insights into the extent to which policy towards Latin America might be typical or unique.

For Spanish relations with Latin America, of course, the exact reverse is true. For Spain, policy towards Latin America is special and generates the cor- responding amount of researchers’ attention, more than this literature review could ever hope to analyse. Alongside overarching studies on policy towards Latin America (e.g. Malamud 2004; del Arenal 2009a; Moltó 2010), there are also numerous studies on Spanish policy towards Latin America within the EU framework (e.g. Grugel 2002; del Arenal 2006). Latin America also plays an important role in the literature analysing Spanish development policy, as it is a major recipient of Spanish development assistance (e.g. Martínez and Sanahuja 2010; de la Iglesia-Caruncho 2011). However, with some exceptions such as Baklanoff (1996) or Youngs (2000), output is often limited to Spanish- language publications. While more recently, some papers are also published in English, even if they are published by think tanks based in Spain (e.g. Grugel 2002; Gratius 2010), there is still a language barrier that prevents research on Spanish foreign policy towards Latin America, but also Spanish foreign policy more generally, from being received outside Spain.1 _{Nevertheless, in the case}

of Spanish policy towards Latin America, there is ample possibility for this study to draw on existing literature and compare results with it.

All three bodies of literature have one commonality: they do not speak to each other. Studies focused strictly on the national background do not attempt to set the national policy towards Latin America in relation with other coun- tries’ policies towards the region (in part, this is also due to the aforementioned language barrier). The existing literature can inform this study with regard to policy output. To a more limited degree, since literature is scarce especially for the British case, it can shed light on individual states’ preferences regard- ing Latin America policy. In general, however, the field suffers from a lack of systematic comparative analysis of Latin America policy-making in Europe. In

1_{A similar problem applies to Germany, although in recent years German research has become}

much more internationally focused and centred on publishing with English-language journals and publishing houses, so that its international profile has been raised. Spanish research is moving in a similar direction but has been slower to adapt.

most cases, it focuses either only on a particular aspect of Latin America policy, on one country’s policy, or descriptively on current issues and policy recom- mendations. In order to understand what drives policy-making towards Latin America in Europe, a uniform comparative framework is required to facilitate theory-guided empirical analysis. By presenting such a framework, this study will add not only to the existing academic debate on European-Latin American relations, but also to the unification of individual national bodies of literature that are currently disconnected from one another. This is not just relevant from an academic vantage point, but also from a more practical perspective: as the EU seeks to strengthen its biregional partnership with the region, it is import- ant to obtain a better grasp of what the different EU Member States’ policy backgrounds are in order to discover potential common areas of interest and thus move towards a more concerted EU policy towards the region.

EU-Latin American Relations and the Member States

In addition to the country-specific studies there are some volumes looking at the EU-Latin American relationship which deserve being mentioned at this point, not only because they can provide insights for the case study on national- EU-level interaction, but also because they introduce an element of comparison that the above nuclei of literature on national policy towards Latin America are lacking. In fact, two of the few texts on UK-Latin American relations come from just such edited volumes: Kippin and Grugel’s 2006 study forms part of a book edited by Christian Freres and José A. Sanahuja (2006) on relations between the EU and Latin America. A more recent study of the Europeanisation of British national policy towards Latin America by Laurence Whitehead is forthcoming in a volume edited by Lorena Ruano (forthcoming 2012). Both these volumes also include chapters dealing with Spain (del Arenal 2006; Sanahuja forthcom- ing 2012) and Germany (Bodemer 2006; Trueb forthcoming 2012b). Technically, both are limited to analysing EU Member States’ foreign policies towards Latin America within the EU context. Nonetheless, they also provide insights into the bilateral policies that, especially for the case of Britain, cannot be found elsewhere. Despite this achievement, neither study provides a truly compar- ative framework of European countries’ policies towards Latin America. This is, in part, due to their limitation to the EU context as these studies focus on one specific aspect of foreign policy. It is, however, also due to the nature of edited volumes, which by virtue of being composed of individual researchers’ contributions tend to struggle with providing what George and Bennett call “structured, focused comparison” (2005: 67ff, 71). Therefore, although these studies are broader in scope because they include more country case studies,

the present investigation is better able to directly relate results from the differ- ent countries under study with one another.

In addition, there is a body of literature concerned with the biregional re- lationship between Europe and Latin America more generally, without focus- ing on specific Member States. This is the case of studies by Grabendorff and Seidelmann (2005), Sanahuja (2006), Gratius (2007; 2008; 2009), Maihold (2006; 2007) and Freres et al. (2007). Others are concerned with particular policy areas, such as development (e.g. Freres 2000; 2010). While the biregional rela- tionship is not the focus of this investigation, these contributions are helpful in- sofar as they reflect on the importance of the Member States within the relation- ship, as for instance Westphal’s contribution to Grabendorff and Seidelmann’s volume does (Westphal 2005a: 354). With respect to this field, the present study therefore constitutes a more in-depth analysis of the factors emanating from the Member States that substantially shape the biregional relationship. By complementing the literature on European-Latin American relations from the perspective of systematically comparing national foreign policies towards Latin America, this contribution goes to form part of this research tradition in a meaningful way.

In the following, I introduce and discuss this study’s dependent variable, foreign policy towards Latin America conceptualised as policy activity towards the region. This variable will be subject to further scrutiny in Chapter 3, where it will be measured for all three countries under study, and contrasted in detail. I then go on to analyse how various theories of foreign policy can be helpful in devising an overarching explanatory framework, and provide general hy- pothetical statements that may be pertinent to an explanation of cross-national variation.