Within about a ten-day period, I received two very exciting “accept” notices for pieces that I’d been working on for quite a long time. I’m very glad to say that I have two new forthcoming articles, one in World Politics and the other in Foreign Policy Analysis! I’ll explain the two pieces a bit below, but they are quite different. One is connected to a long-term project of historical research. The other emerged as a sort of side project, basically from conversations with Francisco Urdinez while I was in Chile for the Fulbright. That said, it ended up connecting closely with some of my IR theory interests around status, asymmetry, and small states. I’ll update with further publication information and links when that’s available, but here are the citations:
- Tom Long, “Historical Antecedents and Post-WWII Regionalism in the Americas,” World Politics, Vol. 72, No. 2 (forthcoming, April 2020).
- Tom Long and Francisco Urdinez, “Status at the Margins: Why Paraguay Recognizes Taiwan and Shuns China,” Foreign Policy Analysis (forthcoming, n.d.).
World Politics
The first article, in World Politics, draws on archival work that I gathered over several years in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States (State Department and Truman Library). It’s part of a big project about the post-WWII period in the Americas, which also produced my recent piece on the Larreta Doctrine in Perspectives on Politics, with Max Paul Friedman. The plan is for this to lead to a book project that would explore creation of regional order- and institution-building, with greater attention to Latin American designs, interests, contributions, and frustrations.
Substantively, the article explores Latin American contributions to emerging security orders in the late 1940s. There’s some classic work on this era’s influence in domestic Latin America politics (e.g., Bethell and Roxborough), but the multinational archival work on foreign relations remains pretty thin. Theoretically, it engages with IR debates about regional variation in postwar orders, connecting to debates on comparative regionalism and the “Why is there no NATO in Asia?” debate launched by Hemmer and Katzenstein nearly fifteen years ago. Methodologically, it employs historical institutionalism’s conceptual tools to offer a more systematic explanation of how “history matters” in the formation of international institutions. This meant really diving into the dynamics and logics of critical junctures, as well as mechanisms for change in historical institutionalism (layering and conversion, especially).
This article has been a long time in the making. Just to give you a sense: I drafted and presented the first, historical component of this article for a December 2016 history seminar at the Latin America Centre at Oxford University. I had a rough version out for comments to colleagues in late summer 2017. The acknowledgements note is like half a page, because I presented earlier versions of this so many places (ISA, LASA, CIDE, PUC, UniAndes, Oxford, UCL). It’s been a long road (with a bit of fairly gut-wrenching rejection along the way), but I also got a lot of support and great feedback that motivated me to work through some issues and aim high with the sharpened version. World Politics! I couldn’t be happier about where it ended up.
Foreign Policy Analysis
The second piece, which was accepted about a week before the World Politics article, emerged during my Fulbright in Chile. Basically, the brilliant Francisco Urdinez told me about a project involving Paraguay-Taiwan relations, and wanted to talk about the literature on small states. One thing led to another, and Francisco being a very generous scholar, this turned into a really fun collaboration, during which I learned a lot. The piece is mixed methods, drawing on a counterfactual model to estimate the opportunity cost paid by Paraguay — Chinese loans, investments, and credits lost as a lack of diplomatic relations. Taiwan’s aid, investment, and market don’t make up the difference. Over various iterations, it became clear that this set up a puzzle — why continue to pay this cost? To explore this, the article draws on interviews and a longitudinal case study.
Our answer is two-fold. Internationally, the Paraguay-Taiwan relationship creates status benefits. Those benefits are asymmetrical, but valued by each side. However, this is status “at the margins” of international society, and it differs in important respects from the types of great-power-centric status that receive the most attention in IR. There’s also an important story about the domestic foundations: elite structures in Paraguay allow for concentration of material and immaterial status benefits, while also shaping a narrow and conservative foreign policy decision-making structure. I got to delve into research about de facto states, recognition and international-legal sovereignty, and small states and status, all of which helped me think through this bilateral relationship in new ways.
The relationship has continued to evolve, even since we sent the piece. What we’ve seen is growing domestic contestation about opportunity costs and the division of benefits, largely among sectors of the Paraguayan economic elite. Taiwan has responded to this (and to the loss of allies elsewhere) with policies quite evidently targeted at minimizing these divisions and underscoring the “status at the margins” that Paraguayans value.
Tom Long, PhD 