End of Ideology in the Americas?

The Fifth Summit of the Americas demonstrated something unimaginable just a few years ago -- the leaders of the hemisphere can actually like a U.S. president. President Obama was again the star of an international gathering and each leader in the Americas took a moment to celebrate his presence and welcome his message of a new era of mutual respect.

But old habits die hard. During the opening ceremony, it was clear that some leaders in the region would have a hard time giving up old grudges. And personal affinity for Obama did not translate into unanimous support for the summit's closing declaration.

In her opening speech, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner proudly recalled that the previous summit, held in Mar del Plata in 2005, marked the death of the U.S.-touted Free Trade Area of the Americas. What's more, she said, it represented the end of the region's "subordination" to U.S. policies and the Washington Consensus.

Then Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega took the podium and spent nearly an hour recounting the contentious history between his country and Washington. His diatribe about U.S. "terrorist" and "expansionist" policies rang of the indignation still common in the region and left many wishing the Americas could just move on already.

And then Obama did just that -- and invited the others to do the same. "To move forward, we cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements," he said, as a special guest speaker during the ceremony. "Too often, an opportunity to build a fresh partnership of the Americas has been undermined by stale debates" -- debates tainted with Cold War rhetoric and outmoded ideologies.

Obama's higher-ground approach injected a welcome dose of realism where previous either/or options no longer apply. The debates over "rigid, state-run economies or unbridled and unregulated capitalism," as Obama put it, are anachronistic and don't contribute solutions to today's challenges.

I spoke with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias about the possibility that the region is entering a new, post-ideology era. Arias said that while it often appears stalled in the "perennial debate over ideologies ... the 'ism' that must prevail is pragmatism."

During one of the summit's closed door discussions, Arias said he told the story of how in 1962, after traveling abroad, the Chinese revolutionary Deng Xiaoping convinced his Maoist comrades that "they had to change course and that he didn't care whether the cat was white or black but only whether it could catch mice." Since then, China has adopted a model that has allowed it "to become the country with the most successful economic growth in the past 35 years," he added.

Whatever Latin America's cat eventually looks like, it remains important to the region's leaders that it isn't imposed by an external power. As Guatemalan Foreign Minister Haroldo Rodas argued in an interview, the attempt by the world's superpowers to force their ideologies on others during the Cold War "gave us the internal armed conflict in Guatemala." He added that today, Latin America's different ideologies or philosophies are locally grown and democratically supported and therefore must be respected.

In this context it is not surprising that Cuba, the only country not present at the hemispheric gathering, grabbed so much attention. The tensions of the U.S.-Cuba relationship, the last vestiges of the Cold War, represent for many people in the region a reminder of harmful U.S. policies of the past. Obama's promise to seek "a new beginning" with the island was a necessary precondition to give greater credence to his invitation to move forward and start looking to the future. It would be great if Ortega or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could put pragmatism ahead of ideology. But being products of the past or enamored with some of those who were, it's clearly much harder for them to move on than Obama, who wasn't even born at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

It's crucial that the more reasonable leaders of the Americas accept the U.S. president's challenge to risk a change in behavior, abandon old habits and, more importantly, accept more demanding responsibilities. Arias said he told the leaders at the summit that "each time we meet with our rich brother, it is only to demand or to complain and the truth is that it is our own fault, and we cannot blame anybody else that the 21st century is not the century of Latin America."
Still, Latin America could come out stronger from the current economic crisis and return to steady and equitable growth -- as long as its leaders make efforts to improve life for their people. That is, as Obama said, "not a matter of abstractions or ideological debates."