Harvard University Press
In Their Own Best Interest: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans
Key Metrics
- Lars Schoultz
- Harvard University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780674984141
- 9.3 X 6.4 X 1.2 inches
- 1.5 pounds
- History > United States - 20th Century
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
For over a century, the United States has sought to improve the behavior of the peoples of Latin America. Perceiving their neighbors to the south as underdeveloped and unable to govern themselves, U.S. policymakers have promoted everything from representative democracy and economic development to oral hygiene. Whatever the problem, a bureaucratic culture in Washington D.C. is committed to finding solutions that will uplift Latin Americans.
The United States' paternalistic role as improver of nations began in the Progressive Era, Lars Schoultz shows, when an altruistic belief in bettering others gained currency. During the Cold War, institutions were established to turn that belief into concrete commitments designed to shore up national security against the threat of communism. Many of these institutions, such as the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy, live on in the contemporary uplift industry. Through exponential expansion, they now employ tens of thousands of government workers and outsource to private contractors the job of improving peoples around the globe.
But is improvement a progressive impulse to help others, or a realpolitik pursuit of a superpower's interests? In Their Own Best Interest wrestles with this tension between helping the less fortunate and demanding payback in the form of subordination. In the twenty-first century, Schoultz writes, the uplift industry is embedded deeply in our foreign policy, extending well beyond relations with Latin America, and the consequences are troubling. Many Latin Americans now say: You have a habit of giving--we have a habit of receiving.
Author Bio
Lars Schoultz, William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Political Science, received his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from UNC. His area of special interest is inter-American relations. He has held a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Buenos Aires to study Argentine electoral behavior, two postdoctoral research grants from the Social Science Research Council to study United States policy toward Latin America, and a Ford Foundation grant to study U.S. immigration policy.
He has been a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security and held residential fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the National Humanities Center. Schoultz is the recipient of the Tanner Award (1982), the Class of 1994 Award (1994), and the William Friday Award(2006), all for teaching excellence, and he is a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of the Grail/Valkyries, both student honoraries.
He is the author of Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America ( Princeton, 1981), The Populist Challenge:Argentine Electoral Behavior in the Postwar Era (UNC, 1983), National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America (Princeton, 1987), Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Harvard, 1998), That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (UNC, 2009), and In Their Own Best Interests: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans (Harvard, 2018). His single-authored articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review,
The American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Latin American Research Review, and Political Science Quarterly. He is a past president of the Latin American Studies Association, which in 2019 honored him with the Kalman Silvert Award.
Source: Department of Political Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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