American Hegemony Under Challenge

The latter phases of this book have focused on challenges to neoliberalism emanating from the two most prominent members of the Pink Tide: Venezuela and Brazil. This final chapter broadens this discussion, returning to the theme from the Introduction, namely the prospects for US hegemony in Latin America. This is because the Pink Tide’s challenge to neoliberalism cannot be divorced from the challenge it poses to the United States as the global hegemon and major driving force of neoliberal globalisation since the 1980s. This hegemony has come under increased challenge over the past decade, at the very time that the Latin American region increasingly charts its own future. Chapters 4–6 examined some of the domestic and regional issues associated with this process, focusing on a growing desire for political, economic and, ideological autonomy in Latin America, which makes it less susceptible to domination from the United States. This chapter explores the other side of this process, namely its impact on US hegemony in the region and America’s attempts to respond to it. Its failure to adequately do so, I suggest, signals deeper problems both for America’s global position and the neoliberal project through which it has projected its power since the last great crisis of its hegemony in the 1970s.