Book Review: Latin American Foreign Policies in the New World Order: The Active Non-Alignment Option
| Published date | 01 March 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020241234878 |
| Author | Varun Sahni |
| Date | 01 March 2024 |
is, without a doubt, a must-read for scholars and policymakers who wish to
better understand PacificAsia’s regional orders and contemporary US-China
relations.
Funding
The review is supported by Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (Grant
No. 2021THZWJC16).
Carlos Fortin, Jorge Heine, and Carlos Ominami, eds.,
Latin American Foreign Policies in the New World Order: The Active Non-Alignment Option.
London: Anthem, 2023. 290pp. £25.
ISBN: 978-1-83998-572-0
Reviewed by: Varun Sahni, (varunsahni@jnu.ac.in), School of International Studies, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, India
DOI: 10.1177/00207020241234878
Often, the subtitle of an academic book better captures its content than the title does.
That is certainly the case here. The concept of active non-alignment (ANA) was first
articulated by Carlos Ominami in August 2019, a mere four years ago and just a few
months before a global pandemic overturned long-standing platitudes and certitudes.
In 2020 and 2021, the three editors of this book published several journal articles
on their ANA proposal in Spanish, English, French, and Mandarin. A co-edited
book in Spanish was published in Santiago de Chile in 2021; this book under
review is best regarded as the English version (rather than a translation).
Non-alignment, as it originally emerged from India after its independence in 1947,
was the attempt of a large but weak post-colonial state to acquire autonomy over its
policy in a rigidly bipolar world. Although it is often derided and dismissed in India
today, non-alignment was at the time an innovative foreign policy that was both
prudent (from a realist perspective) and ethical (from a normative perspective). As
an attractive foreign policy option for the newly decolonized states of Asia and
Africa, non-alignment soon transcended its Indian origins. The Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM) was the collaborative creation of two Asians (Jawaharlal Nehru
and Sukarno), two Africans (Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Abdel Nasser) and one
extraordinary European (Josip Broz Tito).
Latin America was notably not in the picture during non-alignment’s foundational
moment. However, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a transformation of the
non-aligned agenda from East-West geopolitical polarity to North-South geo-
economic structural inequities. As the four country-specific chapters in the book (on
Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, all written by formidable scholar-practitioners)
remind us, it was precisely the transformed non-aligned agenda that attracted the
164 International Journal 79(1)
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