Diplomacy Decentralized: Latin American Substate Couples

Abstract

In spite of its growing methodological ambition, the study of diplomatic couples has, for many years, been approached in strictly intergovernmental terms. For decades the reduction of bilateral relations to a simple two-player game made it difficult to grasp the social and political complexity that bilateral relations unavoidably entail. The introduction of bilateral trade, demography and other explanatory variables of diplomatic dyads later led to an acknowledgment that there is more at play in the shaping of diplomatic couples than simple intergovernmental contacts. However, reduced to mere statistical figures, these important elements were generally void of any significant sociohistorical or strictly political meaning. More recently the introduction of new theoretical models, such as Putnam’s “two-level” games, facilitated a renewal in the field, but in the end they, once again, came to confirm how difficult it can be to reduce social pluralism and institutional complexity to the convenient rationalistic models that positivist approaches tend to prefer. Consequently, both the wider plurality of voices and the diversity of meanings that bilateral diplomacy encompasses for different social groups, and the diverse institutional mediations existing both within and across territorial jurisdictions of states, remain widely ignored in this field of research.