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DOI: 10.28995/2073-6339-2023-2-140-145
Rethinking the postgraduate international and Latin American studies in South America
Ignacio Liendo
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina, [email protected]
For citation: Liendo, I. (2023), "Rethinking the postgraduate international and Latin American studies in South America", RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. "Political Science. History. International Relations"Series, no. 2, pp. 140-145, DOI: 10.28995/2073-6339-2023-2-140-145
Переосмысление последипломных международных и латиноамериканских исследований в Южной Америке
Игнасио Лиендо Национальный университет Кордовы, Кордова, Аргентина, [email protected]
Для цитирования: Liendo I. Rethinking the postgraduate international and Latin American studies in South America // Вестник РГГУ. Серия «Политология. История. Международные отношения». 2023. № 2. С. 140-145. DOI: 10.28995/2073-6339-2023-2-140-145
Comte maintained that, in order to study a science field, one had to know its history, tracing its origins. "You don't know a science if you don't know its history".
For this reason, it is important to highlight that -just as Political Science can trace its origins back to Plato and Aristotle-, International Studies, and most specifically, International Relations, can trace its own back to Thucydides and Polybius and then, to the old masters of Geopolitics: Ratzel, Mahan, Kjellén, MacKinder, and Haushofer.
Without a doubt, despite its limitations, Geopolitics can be considered the modern source from which International Relations as a discipline and the most powerful states drank to outline the great strategic lines of action of their respective foreign policies.
© Liendo I., 2023
However, this important fact is usually avoided since Geopolitics was transformed, after 1945, into a kind of "cursed discipline", despite the fact that all the great powers, after World War II, have continued, to a large extent, basing their hegemonic policies in cases of indisputable geopolitical nature.
According to Gullo, it is also important to highlight -because it is a fact totally unknown by European, North American and Latin American academics-, that International Relations can also trace its origins in the thought of some of the most important men of the so-called Latin American Generation of 1900, comprised of, among others, the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, the Mexican José Vasconcelos, and the Argentines Manuel Ugarte and José Ingenieros. Intellectual sons of the Generation of 1900 are, among others, the Peruvian politician and intellectual Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and the Uruguayan thinker Alberto Methol Ferré, author of the Theory of Continental States and a remarkable influence on the geopolitical thought of Pope Francis.
Once the origins of International Relations have been determined, it should be specified that this field was born, as an academic discipline, mainly in Europe (and incipiently in the United States), as a consequence of the terrible trauma that the First World War had caused in European society and, in substance, due to the need of the English elite to reflect on how to stop the notorious decline of British power after the Great War. It is precisely then, at the end of the First World War, those International Relations were born as an autonomous scientific discipline.
The first Chair of International Relations was created in Wales in 1919. Shortly after, Oxford and the London School of Economics created their respective Chairs of International Relations. The three British Chairs - and by the then newly created "Royal Institute of International Affairs" - pursued the same common purpose: to understand the changes that were taking place in the international system and to know, consequently, what Great Britain had to do to recover and maintain its power, in the new international scenario.
On the other hand, the need to form political-diplomatic cadres for the recently created League of Nations - imagined by most liberal politicians and intellectuals as the embryo of a future world government -led to the creation, in the city of Geneva, of the first University Institute fully devoted to the study of International Relations: the University Institute of Advanced Studies founded in 1927 in Switzerland on the initiative of the rector of the University of Geneva. It is important to note that this Institute was born politically sponsored by President Wilson, in close institutional relationship with the League of Nations and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.
The first body of professors of the Institute believed that they were founding, at that time, with the creation of international organizations, the formation of a cosmopolitan international civil service and the establishment of free trade at the world level, those conditions that would finally make possible, and the establishment of a lasting global peace. Free trade was, for most of the Institute's professors, the best possible tool to guarantee world peace. This liberal thought permeated academia and politics throughout the world.
It is interesting to point out the creation in the Argentinian Republic, more precisely in the city of Rosario, on August 17, 1920, of the Degree in Diplomacy at the Faculty of Economic, Commercial and Political Sciences of the National University of Rosario. It was also the University of Rosario - from 1927, - the first one in Latin America to award a PhD in Diplomacy, organizing the first Graduation Ceremony, on September 21, 1932. It is politically relevant to note that the Bachelor of Diplomacy and the PhD in Diplomacy were created in the city of Rosario and not in Buenos Aires, capital city of Argentina.
The outbreak of the Second World War froze the development of International Relations in Europe. But then, crossing the Atlantic, as soon as the war ended, the discipline will have a second birth in the United States, so dazzling - due to the degree of development and depth reached in its study - that will make us forget its European origins. That is why it is usually considered, following Stanley Hoffmann, International Relations as an American social science.
When the study of International Relations was reborn in the United States, it will acquire characteristics that will accompany nowadays:
The exaggerated emphasis placed on studies that deal only with the present.
The deficient knowledge of Universal History.
The lack of sufficient studies on the relationship between the strong and the weak.
The strictly North American perspective.
This caused, in turn, seven consequences, in the rest of the world:
That the North American theoretical production reigned absolutely in the international academic universe and that, by logical consequence, in most of the world's universities. As a result, International Relations were analyzed through the use of theories produced in the high institutes of excellence from United States.
That the texts that are used, in the majority of International Relations careers in all the Universities of the world, especially in the matter of International Relations Theory, with few exceptions, are those of the great North American or European scholars living in the United States, who wrote their major works since the mid-twentieth century.
That the United States became a great "Mecca' for those who sought to train - and specialize - in the study of International Relations.
That foreign students who returned to their respective countries of origin -after having trained and specialized in North American Universities- brought with them the peculiar American way of conceiving the study of International Relations, a conception according to which studying International Relations is almost a synonym of studying Theory of International Relations.
That there was a thoughtless follow-up, by academics residing outside the United States, of the debates and categories in vogue produced in the prestigious North American universities.
That English became the lingua franca of International Relations.
That Latin American Studies followed these specialization guidelines, with a strong bias in the economy and democratization processes, from a North American perspective, and far from the national interest of the States and South American Integration.
On the other hand - according to Hoffmann - another problem of International Relations essentially linked to the fact of the second birth of the discipline in the United States - which leads to a real deficiency in the understanding of the international system, - refers to the lack of enough studies on the functioning of the international hierarchy, or if preferred, on the nature of the relations between the weak and the strong. This fact naturally led to the fact that the question about "how and under what conditions the weak have been able to counteract their inferiority" has not been at the center of the scientific research. This has not allowed the development of autonomous Latin American Studies.
Unlike what happens in other parts of the world, for the majority of American researchers and professors working in this field, the specificity of the work of experts in International Relations is "to produce knowledge for State consumption".
In other words, for American academics, "the social usefulness of International Relations studies lies in producing knowledge that can be offered to State institutions, so that the political leaders can make the most convenient decisions for the State's interests". That is why, unlike most countries, in the United States "the academic world is part of the State and works to provide it with knowledge that can strengthen it".
In the United States, there is no kind of modesty among academics in working for State institutions, including intelligence and espionage agencies. "Serving the Department of State, the CIA or any other security, intelligence or espionage agency is not a reason for fear or disdain among the American academics", but a source of pride.
That is why it is essential to understand - as Hoffmann also points out - that when the experts in International Relations in Mexico, in
Buenos Aires, in Rio de Janeiro, in Berlin or in Beijing, reflect and follow, more or less slavishly and with some delay, the North American "fashions" - that is, the debates and the categories of analysis in vogue -they reflect, and also serve the political interest of the United States. In turn, they are increasing American soft power, given the strong connection between the academic world and the world of power in the US, which places to the brightest academics and researchers not merely in the "corridors" of power but also in the "kitchen" of power.
Finally, it is important to highlight, paradoxically, as a problem for the study of International Relations, the fact that English has become the lingua franca of the discipline. The British professor Arthur John Richard Groom, in his book "Contemporary International Relations; A Guide to Theory", affirms that English is not only the lingua franca of International Relations: Due to the foundations of the discipline rest on a mortar of Anglo-Saxon mold, the predominance of the English language in International Relations as a discipline of study, is an irreversible and inevitable fact.
As Gonçalves and Valente point out, "The most notorious symptom of the presence of North American cultural elements in International Relations is the presentation of the evolution of this discipline through paradigmatic debates". Indeed, the stages of progress in International Relations are exhaustively exposed by all the theoretical studies of the discipline, constituting an authentic 'mantra' always present in the numerous manuals written by Anglo-Saxon academics. For many, the knowledge of these stages or the basic content of each one of the paradigms come to be considered as a distinctive sign of inclusion in the academic area of International Relations. Those who claim to be recognized as academics in the area and reveal a lack of knowledge about the order of evolution of these paradigms (or are unable to cite the names of the most outstanding North American scholars in each of these stages and their respective works) "have their reputation as scholars of International Relations placed in doubt".
It is important to note that, in Latin America, intellectuals such as Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, Arturo Jauretche, José Hernández Arregui, Felipe Herrera, Raúl Prebisch, Jorge Abelardo Ramos, Alberto Methol Ferré, or Andrés Soliz tried to observe and analyze the international reality with their own points of view. Rada, Aldo Ferrer, Paulo Schilling, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, and more specifically, from International Relations as a discipline of study, Juan Carlos Puig, Bruno Boloña, Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, Helio Jaguaribe and Amado Cervo tried to carry out the same task.
The brief historical account that we have made about the origins of International Relations as a discipline of study proves that Interna-
tional Relations were born as a reflection carried out first, by the British and then by the North American power, in order to achieve certain political purposes, far from the promotion of the national interests of South America's nations and their integration. Latin American Studies are affected by this dynamic.
This irrefutable verification demonstrates the deep need of carrying out an always "situated reflection" to develop from there International Studies and Latin American Studies in view of the national interest and focused on the new realities of the multipolar world with a special attention on Eurasia and the BRICS.
Information about the author
Ignacio Liendo, Doctor en Estudios de América Latina Contemporánea, professor, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina; 153, Av. Vélez Sarsfield, Córdoba, Argentina, X5000JJB; [email protected]
Информация об авторе
Игнасио Лиендо, доктор современных латиноамериканских исследований, профессор, Национальный университет Кордовы, Кордова, Аргентина; X5000JJB, Аргентина, Кордова, пр-кт Велес Сарсфилд, д. 153; ignacio. [email protected]
