Another day, another response to last week’s CIC Forum on Canada – Latin America Relations: now we have Jonathan Manthorpe‘s Vancouver Sun article, “Latin America rivals Asia as Canadian partner”.
Manthorpe underscores the conference theme that Latin America is more important to Canada than people realize. He also repeats the mantra of partnership and the rhetoric of equality: “Latin America doesn’t need missionaries – it’s had plenty of those. It wants equal partnerships.”
This notion of partnership is almost always bogus. Yet it’s truly fearsome to see how much work is done by the term, which probably first came into vogue in 1990s Britain and the creation of “Public-Private Partnerships” as a smokescreen for privatization and public-sector outsourcing. Now it is the buzzword du jour for redescribing a host of very different international economic and political relationships, complementing and perhaps even replacing the equally flawed notion of “civil society” that was so influential in the 1980s and 90s.
British academic Jonathan Davies has an interesting critique of this mania for partnership here, with his paper “Against ‘Partnership’: Toward a Local Challenge to Global Neoliberalism”. In his words: “partnerships that are nominally open to local communities are also becoming increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian. The rise of neoliberal partnerships as ‘an elite form of local governance’ seems inimical to the ideal-typical model of collaborative democracy . . . . Where democracy is undermined by the partnership technocracy, community activists should eschew participation for organized resistance.”
But even left to its own devices, the discourse of partnership quickly runs up against its own limits, just as in its time civil society discourse also too easily revealed its limitations. If for the proponents of civil society, the problem was troublesomely radical social movements, for the prophets of partnership the problem is unaccommodating governments. As Manthorpe says, though most of Latin America has now abandoned “unrealistic economic models and dysfunctional administrations” in favour of “prudent free market economic policies and strengthening their administrative capacities,” there are, sadly, “one or two notable exceptions such as the unreconstructed dictatorial regimes in Venezuela and Cuba.”
Here, then, the ideology (for want of a better word) comes out into the open, and the touchy-feely language of partnership is shelved. We can only be partners, Manthorpe suggests, with people who think like us and do what we say. (And if they do already think like us and do what we say, then no wonder that we don’t need missionaries!) With those who don’t, we won’t bother being friends; they are “unreconstructed dictatorial regimes.”
This, of course, is nonsense. Like it or not, for instance, Venezuela is not a dictatorial regime, unreconstructed or otherwise. Indeed, if Manthorpe had paid a little more attention to the panel he was supposedly chairing last week, he would have heard Max Cameron give a rather more subtle and convincing account of the varieties of democracy (Venezuela’s included) that are currently flourishing in Latin America. One may have problems with democracy a la venezolana–and Cameron certainly pointed out what he saw as some of its defects–but you don’t have a leg to stand on if you don’t recognize it for what it is.
And while Cuba may indeed be a dictatorial regime, there is little that is “unreconstructed” about it. If there is anything that has marked Castroism over the past fifty years, it is its flexibility, its pragmatism, and its capacity for periodic reinvention, which have allowed it to enter many de facto (as well as de jure) “partnerships,” not least for instance with its supposed ideological enemy, the USA. (Even with its armed forces: to take just one example, look at the constant Cuban cooperation with the US coastguard service.)
What’s “unreconstructed,” then, are the old categories to which Manthorpe resorts even as he decorates them with fashionable “partnership” discourse; the unthinking simplification even as he claims some kind of Latin American expertise.