Recasting an Old Relationship

Catherine Osborn, Latin America Brief, Foreign Policy, 31 march 2023

The last time the European Union held a leaders’ summit with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was almost a decade ago, in 2015. In the intervening years, Latin America slipped down Europe’s foreign-policy priorities list as each region confronted its own set of challenges, officials on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledge.

Now, the leaders of Spain and Portugal, along with EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell—who is Spanish—say they want to cozy back up with Latin America. They spent last weekend in the Dominican Republic’s capital of Santo Domingo pitching a reset to regional leaders at an annual gathering known as the Ibero-American Summit.

Although the leaders of Spain and Portugal meet with their former colonies’ leaders in this forum every year, 2023 is “key” for rekindling broader Europe-Latin America relations, Borrell said. Spain will take over the rotating EU presidency in July, and Madrid has used that authority to prioritize an EU-CELAC summit scheduled to take place that month in Brussels.

Spain and Latin America have already grown closer due to the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Madrid has turned to Brazil and Mexico to replace Russian oil supplies and also wants the region to continue mostly voting against Moscow at the United Nations.

Borrell laid out another geopolitical argument for closer ties in Santo Domingo: As countries such as China and the United States move toward protectionism, Latin America and Europe should unite to show that “commercial relations are still a source of progress.” Borrell talked up trade deals that the EU is finalizing with Mexico, Chile, and the South American customs union Mercosur that are designed to include strong environmental and labor protections. Spain’s King Felipe VI, who was also present, said the EU was preparing to announce a round of direct investments in Latin American economies at the July EU-CELAC summit.

While such talk of trade and investment may seem like standard diplomatic fare, the new EU deals with Latin America are designed to respond to shifts in the global balance of power, Spanish international relations scholar José Antonio Sanahuja told Foreign Policy. Sanahuja directs a Spanish government foundation for public policy research and serves as a Latin America advisor to Borrell.

As the world increasingly moves in a bipolar direction, for both Europe and Latin America, “it leaves us in subaltern positions,” Sanahuja said. “It reduces our autonomy,” he added, and cooperating with each other is one way to get it back.

One way Europe and Latin America can collaborate is on green technologies, Sanahuja said. Countries around the world are racing to secure the raw materials needed to electrify cars and otherwise retrofit their economies. Many of those minerals—such as lithium and copper—are abundant in Latin America.

European countries in recent months have emphasized that their green tech cooperation with Latin America will ensure local jobs and development. A joint German-Chilean green hydrogen plant in southern Chile is one example; another is an unconventional provision negotiated in the draft Chile-EU trade agreement that allows Chile to sell some of its lithium at a discounted price to Chilean buyers so that the country can build up its domestic lithium industry.

Europe’s Latin America policy, Borrell said, should reflect the fact that “the circumstances of a well-off, middle-class European are not the same as the circumstances of someone who lives in the Bolivian or Colombian high plains.”

Europe also hopes to collaborate with Latin America more closely on tech regulation, Borrell said. Sanahuja said Latin Americans and Europeans “do not feel very well-represented by the state of regulation of the digital sphere in the United States”—where regulation is minimal—“or by the hyper-regulation of China, with extreme state control.” Europe has prioritized regulating new technologies and the market power of tech behemoths in recent years.

Without good regulation of emerging fields such as satellite technology, Sanahuja added, the world could see more conundrums of the sort unfolding in Ukraine, which is dependent on the use of Starlink satellite technology to fight Russia’s invasion, but one individual—SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—has disproportionate control over how it is used.

Europe seeks trustworthy partners to help set global standards on topics from trade to artificial intelligence, Sanahuja said. The recent political evolution of Europe’s traditional ally, the United States, has “posed a lot of questions to us in Europe. Imagine if a Republican wins the next presidential election and their policies change on issues like Ukraine,” he added.

Sanahuja’s and Borrell’s thinking appears to align with that of the new administration in Brazil—Latin America’s largest country and the region’s most important player in global affairs.

Celso Amorim, a top foreign affairs advisor to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said in an interview with Metrópoles last year that Brazilian relations with Europe were “very important” in the path toward a multipolar rather than bipolar world. In Santo Domingo, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said that “there is a clear contribution to be made by the Ibero-American region to the construction of a global order that is peaceful, dialogue-based, and reinforces multilateralism and the joint construction of multipolarity.”

All these apparent EU-Latin America synergies will first have to be finalized in trade and direct investment deals—which in some cases will depend on support from Latin American legislatures and an often divided EU membership. But Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez vowed to prioritize cooperation from his EU leadership seat. “This is not just talk,” he said.