序-八〇年代のラテンアメリカが提起する諸問題

ラテンアメリカ-1980年代の国際関係と政治-

抄録

The 1980s were ‘the lost decade’ for Latin America from the economic point of view, because almost all of the Latin American countries in this period suffered from not only the serious debt crisis but also the worst stagflation in their history characterized by hyper-inflation and very low economic growth. The average per capita income of the region dropped 9.6% between 1981 and 1990. However, politically it was a profitable decade, since many countries in this region experienced a kind of “democratic revolution”, putting an end to the military regimes which had been predominant in the 70s. This political change has had multiple effects upon Latin American society in general including the intellectual world. One example was the decline of guerrilla forces in many countries, which reduced concomitantly the importance of the “revolutionary” paradigms in the intellectual world such as the dependency theory elaborated by André Gunder Frank and other types of Marxism. In particular, the decline of dependency theory had an effect of weakening the nationalism of the left wing based on its anti-imperialistic discourse.
The democratization also lessened the value of the theory of corporatism which had stressed the authoritarian and non-democratic tradition in this region. In short, the economic and political changes which occurred in the 80s in Latin America have put in doubt many paradigms prevailing in previous decades. Another important change can be also seen in Inter-American relations as a consequence of the weakening of Latin American nationalism on one hand and the decline of United States hegemony in the region on the other.
All these changes have posed a series of new questions to us: e. g. how can we explain the coincidence of the economic crisis with the democratization in the region? how should we evaluate the capacity of the civilian governments to cope with the severe economic problems that even the authoritarian military governments had been unable to resolve? and what will be the future of Inte-American relations, taking into account the declining hegemony of the United States and the increasing internationalism in Latin America? Although not all the articles in this issue try to answer these questions, many are directly or indirectly related to them. It is the editor's hope that this number will stimulate further studies on these topics and others concerning Latin America and the Third World in the 1980s.