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  • Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States
  • Michael Johns
Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States. Edited by Francis Fukuyama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ix and 312 pp., maps, diagrs., photos, notes, appendices, and index. $21.95 paper (ISBN: 9780199754199).

Tocqueville said that nations, like people, always bear the marks of their origins. It's hard to pin the origins of a nation to a particular time or place, and the character of a nation, as it were, is much more complex than that of a person. A nation lasts longer, too, and has more opportunities to change. Yet Tocqueville makes a good point: a nation can't escape its past. In fact, a nation is its past -- everything it has done, made, and been. And its future depends on it.

Francis Fukuyama's edited book Falling Behind is an attempt to explain the historical fact that, since at least the early 1800s, and probably well before, Latin America has been behind the United States -- behind in creating wealth and sharing it fairly evenly, and behind in creating trust in politics, faith in the law, and belief in the pursuit of knowledge through education. And it's unlikely that any country in Latin America will catch the United States any time soon -- or ever.

It's hard to explain the course of nations. But this is exactly what the writers of Falling Behind try to do. For they try to answer for Latin America as a whole what Zavalita asked in Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral: "At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?" Knowing when Latin America got fucked up might help us understand why it got fucked up; and finding the source of the problem can inspire the hope of fixing it. [End Page 258]

That singular issue forms the subtitle of the book -- Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States. And it lends the book a coherence that is often lacking in edited volumes, a coherence that is reinforced by the high quality of thinking that runs through Falling Behind. Tulio Halperin Donghi, for instance, who may well be Latin America's greatest living historian, describes with wit and wisdom the history of Latin Americans' reflections on their own political and economic backwardness -- from the independence leader Simon Bolívar to the dependency theorist Fernando Henrique Cardoso to those promoting the neo-liberal model prescribed by the so-called Washington Consensus. Mexico's political writer Enrique Krauze recounts the envy and admiration, as well as the anger and resentment, with which Mexicans have perceived the chasm between themselves and their northern neighbor -- a chasm that provoked, over a century ago, the doleful saying "Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States." The social philosopher Fukuyama writes intelligently about "defective institutions" that, he argues, have contributed mightily to Latin America's problems. Several other well-known scholars of Latin America discuss, among other things, the role of social inequality in creating the political instability and the winner-take-all attitude that seem to hinder economic development.

Some of the writers in Falling Behind locate the origin of Latin America's difficulties in the "original sin" of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Maya; others see the condition of underdevelopment taking form around the time of independence. Some put greater emphasis on formal and informal institutions; others highlight proximate causes like income inequality and faulty policies. They all converge, however, on the ground of social institutions: the weaker the trust in the rule of law, they say, and in the sanctity of property rights, and in the political system's capacity to solve problems through compromise, the less the capacity for solid, stable, and equitable economic growth. Such social institutions, says Fukuyama, are part of the "norms and habits" that make up culture. While none of the contributors to this volume blame Latin America's problems on any sort of essential features of its culture, they all see the region's historically created cultures as...

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