Formalizing Roles to Assess Extra Regional Powers' Influence on Foreign Policy: South America, China, and the United States, 1990-2015

The People’s Republic of China has been pursuing an active foreign policy across the world. One of the regions where China has increased its engagement is South America. Bilateral trade has soared since the turn of the century, financial loans and Chinese investments have targeted key sectors for China’s interests, direct political contacts have increased, and even military exchanges have been developed across the Pacific. Since this region has traditionally been ordered along the United States’ interests and norms, and there has been a qualitative and quantitative expansion of areas where China interacts with South America, this region becomes an interesting political space to assess the extent of influence Beijing has gained vis-à-vis Washington.

The competition between these two powers in South America has been analyzed from the perspective of China and the United States. This dissertation takes the opposite direction. Based on role theory, and specially on the concepts of role sets and role conflicts, with the aid of social network analysis, content analysis, and congruence procedure, the research focuses on how and on which foreign policy dimensions South America has included China as Significant Other and what has been the consequences of this inclusion for their relations with the United States.

The period of observation was from 1990 to 2015 on three distinct foreign policy domains: economic, political, and military, to compare South American role sets before and after China’s engagement with the region. In this sense, the first step was to identify the ordering of the region according to their master roles because this concept is associated to the position a state occupies within a social hierarchy. The first finding of the research, using social network analysis’ centrality measures, was that four distinct categories of states, according to the extent of their relations with their neighbors, make up the regional order. Moreover, China and the United States privileged 6 states belonging to the first and second most important states, and was concluded, then, that their interactions did not cause a master role conflict with neither of the states. In addition, this analysis also served as a case selection method.

On a following step, speeches at the United Nations General Assembly were content analyzed. The purpose of this analysis was to establish a baseline of role conceptions for the six South American countries and the extra regional powers. Besides this identification, their orientation was also characterized as being Pro-Core, Anti-Core, or Neutral. This led, on the one hand, to advance in the task of building up the role sets for each state, and on the other hand, to the construction of three role networks according to their direction. The main finding in this section was that the Defender of the Faith role was broad enough to allow for the detection of role conflicts and role change.

Based on these role sets, a third step included the analysis of foreign policies associated to the Defender of the Faith role, and thus completing the states’ role sets. On its economic dimension, the level of congruence between the orientation of the role and the economic policies implemented in their states was assessed, using economic freedom and globalization indexes. On the political dimension, the congruence was measured using voting behavior on “important votes” at the United Nations General Assembly. Based on this analysis, only a handful of presidents implemented policies contradicting their own role conceptions, leading to intra-role conflicts. However, these instances occurred in the 1990s, before China’s engagement with the region. Thus, the sources of the conflicts cannot be attributed to Beijing. These were expressions of their domestic realities and their relations with the United States.

Finally, the analysis contrasted the changes in the composition of South American role sets to the degree of their economic, political, and military relations with both China and the United States. The data showed that despite the increase of relations with China and its inclusion as Significant Other, only two countries, after the 2000s, changed the composition of their role sets. Argentina and Venezuela were the only cases in which inter-role conflicts and role changes in relation to the United States were detected due to their own national conditions and their interactions with China. Therefore, it could be concluded that China’s influence in the overall orientation of the region’s foreign policies has been limited and, within the period under observation, it did not represent a big challenge for the United States.