Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America (review)

184 SAISREVIEW meddling, and to compensate, through a liberal foreign policy, for authoritarianism at home. There is no reference to the pan-American impulse that has exerted a varying influence on Mexican diplomacy, which has at some junctures drawn Mexico towards a closer hemispheric union that excluded the U.S. Similarly, the discovery ofoil in 1976, which offered a profound boost to Mexico's international profile and thus afforded the country more independence from the U.S., is not fully explored at the macro level. Despite these faults, Langley should be credited for his relatively objective treatment of an increasingly complicated subject. If he is on occasion guilty of reducing events to simplistic forms, he seems to have done so in the interest of keeping the book accessible to generalists wanting an introduction to the topic. He manages to keep his narrative at a general level and still debunk prevalent U.S. generalizations about Mexico, such as the tendency by U.S. policymakers to interpret the recent schisms in Mexico's authoritarian regime as the birth of a two-party system (modeled, of course, after democracy U.S.-style). Readers of Mexico and the United States: The Fragile Relationship may be left wanting more detail, but the author provides an accurate depiction of the overall framework of U.S.-Mexican relations and seems satisfied leading readers to other writers for more detailed accounts. Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America. Edited by Abraham F. Lowenthal. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 405 pp. $55.00/Hardcover. Reviewed by Jacqueline Mazza, Ph.D. Candidate, SAIS. There is a missing punctuation mark in the title of this book. After reading this work, one might more logically expect a question mark to follow after the phrase "Exporting Democracy." The authors in this volume all question, to some degree, whether the United States actually attempted to, did, or even intended to support democracy south of the border. ExportingDemocracy: The United States andLatinAmerica, which chronicles U.S. efforts to foster democracy in the region, could not be more timely. Latin America is undergoing an unprecedented democratic revolution. Save Cuba and Haiti, civilian governments and democratic reforms are being installed in various degrees throughout the hemisphere. One is tempted to ask, then, did U.S. policy have anything to do with this trend? Since there is no shortage offormer officials of the Reagan and other administrations willing to take credit for the movement towards democracy in Latin America, more objective analysis is warranted. This comprehensive set ofessays concludes that the United States has little to take credit for. The book covers the entire spectrum of U.S. policy towards Latin America since the Wilsonian days, although the greatest attention is given to U.S. policy since World War II. It includes essays giving historical overviews of U.S. policy, country studies, and special topics such as U.S. economic policy and the role of U.S. labor unions. All the essays reexamine U.S. policy through BOOK REVIEWS 185 the critical perspective of democratization of the 1980s, probing whether U.S. rhetoric was matched by deeds. The authors find that U.S. efforts to foster democracy in Latin America were rarely, if ever, very successful. Laurence Whitehead's essay, "The Imposition of Democracy," looks at three ways in which the U.S. attempted to "impose" democracy: by invasion, by intimidation, and by incorporation. He finds only one case in Latin America where a strong, consolidated liberal democracy has been established largely as a result of a sustained U.S. commitment. What country could he be referring to? The one U.S. success story is, surprisingly, Puerto Rico. In this case, U.S.-imposed democratization came at the high cost of the island's national identity and sovereignty. This loss ofnational identity was so great that many would forget to consider Puerto Rico in this context. Whitehead asks in his essay not only whether the U.S. succeeded in establishing democracy in Latin American countries but also what kind ofdemocracy was favored by the massive and unilateral deployment ofU.S. power. In the "successful" case ofPuerto Rico, his assessment was a democracy "based on second...