By John Chipman and James Lockhart Smith
Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 6, December 2009–January 2010, pp. 77–104
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Summits rarely make for exciting television viewing, but the meeting in August 2009 of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) in Argentina, convening all heads of state of the organisation, came close. Unasur, uniting 12 South American states into a single institution, had been created in 2008 after several years of negotiation. Originally envisaged as a continental organisation bringing together the region’s trade blocs, as from March 2008 it has begun to be used as a forum for regional security management, especially in the Andes. The August 2009 meeting had been called to discuss the controversy surrounding an agreement by which Colombia was to allow the United States access to seven facilities and bases on its soil. Presidents Alvaro Uribe of Colombia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, the main parties to the heated regional argument, claimed equal but differing threats to their national and personal security, and expressed opposite views of the US role. Uribe had the previous month leaked information implying that President Chávez continued to assist Colombian insurgents to buy shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles to be used to bring down the presidential plane, and now spoke harshly of Chávez’s affection for them; Chávez referred, in turn, to a plot for his assassination hatched between members of his own opposition and Colombian paramilitaries, and presented an obscure US Air Force White Paper as allegedly disquieting evidence of US imperialism. President Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva of Brazil, Unasur’s principal promoter, elicited at the summit a final collective declaration that made token references to drug trafficking and other non-state threats, and promised to build sovereignty-respecting trust in matters of defence and security, but principally warned against the destabilising effects of ‘the presence of foreign military forces’. The live coverage of the event, on which Uribe had insisted as a guarantee of transparency and insurance against excessive verbal aggression by his Venezuelan counterpart, in the event served to infect this new regional security institution with the familiar and unproductive rhetoric of megaphone diplomacy. Leaders took turns striking poses for their respective electorates rather than talking to each other and solving issues, in the process presenting distorted vignettes of strategic reality. The summit showed the difficulties in building an effective regional security institution from the top down and revealed the need for Unasur to develop a stronger institutional base. The Defence Council of Unasur, which convenes defence ministers for a more focused agenda, offers the promise of being just the right vehicle, if heads of government are willing to empower it with the means of carrying out a pragmatic agenda of consultations. A measured programme of regular meetings on agreed subjects could in time serve to cultivate a more common strategic culture among South American states and develop settled norms to govern conflict resolution. Summits of heads of government might still be characterised by aggressive rhetoric and grandstanding, but if the Defence Council were to build the underpinnings of professional security relations, the malign effects of theatrical summitry would be containable. The form of Defence Council consultations would have to be closely...
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John Chipman is Director-General and Chief Executive of the IISS. James Lockhart Smith is Research Associate for Latin America at the IISS. This essay grew out of a speech originally delivered by John Chipman in Santiago, Chile, in August 2009.
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