crucial to understanding the foreign policy orientations of certain Southern Cone states.
Second, changes in foreign policy orientations within the region during the last decade
might owe more to the vanishing of authoritarian regimes than to the return of
democratically elected leaders. Third, the conflict proneness of authoritarian regimes during
the 1970s is explained by the pervasive influence that a particular geopolitical discourse of
international politics had over certain military establishments in the region (those of
Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru).
The perspective offered here seeks to explain the conflictive nature of inter-state relations
(and, by the same token, the lesser significance of inter-state cooperation) in the Southern
Cone during the 1970s. It partly explains by default the lesser significance of inter-state
conflict ever since, although it does not preclude the possibility that democratically elected
governments might find their own reasons to fight each other (as Ecuador and Peru have
done). It does not explain (nor does it attempt to explain), the significant increase in inter-
state cooperation since 1990.
2. AN OVERVIEW OF THE PAPER.
The first part of the second chapter traces the development of the geopolitical thought that
provided the interpretive framework on security affairs that prevailed within military
quarters in the Southern Cone during the 1970’s. It suggests that it was not merely a
coincidence that the founder of geopolitics (Friedrich Ratzel) was also a zoologist and a
contemporary of Charles Darwin (in fact, the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution was
as pervasive in this particular field of knowledge as it was in many others), and argues that
this interpretive framework was constituted on the basis of an organic metaphor of the state,
an evolutive metaphor of inter-state relations, and a vitalist account of organic evolution.
Geopolitics led statesmen in these countries to abhor vacuum. However, “filling” their
inner space entailed more than merely extending the presence of the state to relatively
underdeveloped areas within its territory: moral and political vacuum were feared even
more than geographical emptiness. To avoid this kind of vacuum, the entire nation had to
coalesce around a common purpose. Political doctrines and movements conflicting with
this purpose had to be excluded from the national realm. The second part of the second
Convention