SEPTEMBER 11, 2001:

AMERICAS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES1

Alain Musset
EHESS-GGSEU

« Le 11 septembre, l’Amérique et les sciences sociales », Cahiers des Amériques Latines,

n° 37, 2001.

The attacks which caused the destruction of the Twin Towers of World Trade Center in New
York, September 11, 2001, shattered the world and in particular the American continent, too
easily convinced to be safe from the convulsions which, since the World War I, agitate the
remainder of the planet.2 We all were struck of stupor and fear, by seeing the two airliners
flown by religious extremists to be crashed in these buildings of glass and steel which
symbolized the almighty power of the United States, involving thousands of victims with
them into death. Spent the moments of doubt, incredulity, horror, it was necessary to accept
obviousness: no Star Wars’s style anti-missile shield, designed to protect the populations from
a "traditional" attack, imagined at the time of the cold war, could prevent new kamikases from
perpetrating on the American ground the most fatal attacks.
As many other colleagues who were to go at the moment to Latin America, I needed to defer
my trip one week and to take a plane which did not fly over the airspace of the United States.
Arrived at San José (Costa Rica) one week later, I was struck to note that, if all my
interlocutors declared themselves horrified by the events, they tended to moderate their
remarks when it was a matter of evaluating the share of responsibility for this awful event.
Without falling in primary anti-Americanism, they told me that their great neighbour, since
the fall of the Soviet Union, tended to behave like the single guard of the new world order,
and that Central America had lived a long time under the direct or indirect rule of the White
House and the CIA. As said to me a Guatemalan student: since 1951 and the dismissal of the
General Jacobo Arbenz, who had dared to defy the United Fruit Company, the military
governments supported by Washington caused the death of more than two hundred and
thousand peasants, without any international reaction. For once, in his opinion, the North-
American people was struck at home: it was only a terrible kind of immanent justice.
Without arriving at such ends, which can be explained by the weight of a recent history,
whose wounds are not closed yet, I thereafter heard in Mexico similar speeches. Old
nationalist resentments, supplied with the economic fracture which opposes the inhabitants
installed to the north and south of Rio Grande, did nothing but maintain the ambiguity of
individual and collective reactions. Since the taxi driver to the deputy of the National
Assembly, each Mexican felt himself directly touched by the collapse of Twin Towers, but
much were more or less discreetly delighted to see proud Gringolandia wavering on his
bases. On internet, messages of often doubtful taste flowered and, in the evening, the families
connected to the world network exchanged the best pieces of the day, such this map of the
Middle East representing all the countries searched by the agents of the CIA in order to find
Bin Laden and its accomplices. Pakistan, Ouzbekistan, or Tadjikistan had disappeared,

1
The translation presented here was made by the author. It is not a a professional work.
2
However, bloody attacks perpetrated in Buenos Aires against the Israeli interests (bombing against the embassy
of Israel, March 17, 1992) or against the Jewish community (booby-trapped car in the car park of the Jewish
Argentinian Mutual Association, July 18, 1994) showed that the Atlantic Ocean was not a sufficient obstacle to
limit the action of the terrorist groups originating in the Middle East.

1
replaced by imaginary States, with evocative names: Aquiestan, Aquinoestan, Quizasestan,
etc.3
Mexico, full member of the North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), could only
offer unconditional support to its wounded ally. However, the position of president Vicente
Fox was considered to be ambiguous by a great part of the Mexican political community.
Without respecting the traditional divide between right and left, already troubled by the subtle
sharing of the power between Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI) and Partido of Revolución Democrática (PRD), some politicians
reproached him for having too much been long in expressing his support to President Bush,
while others pointed his Foreign Minister to be the trusty servant of a super power with
hegemonic ambitions. If these frictions are mainly the reflection of the internal quarrels which
agitate Mexican political microcosm for a long time, they are also based on images,
stereotypes and feelings largely shared by the public opinion.4
To silence its detractors, the administration of President Fox had to remember that agreements
of mutual assistance linked all the States of the continent and obliged them to ally with others
in case of external attack. And as a matter of fact, since the policy "of good vicinity" boosted
by Franklin D. Roosevelt toward Latin-American countries, the problem of the
intercontinental military cooperation is a theme of many debates. We can indeed consider
that, in the 1930’s, the topic lent itself into a broad consensus, since it was a question of
facing the rise of the Nazism in Europe and the expansionism of Japan in the Pacific basin.
America, continent surrounded by proven or potential enemies, needed to present a united
front, in spite of the unhappy initiatives of some desperate latino-americanists, perverted heirs
of Simon Bolivar, who had believed to find in Hitler’s Germany an alternative to Anglo-
Saxon hegemony.
Since 1942, the Foreign Ministers of the Western hemisphere, to take again the expression
made famous by Whitaker (1954), established in Rio de Janeiro the bases of a regional
military cooperation, based on a declaration "of reciprocal assistance and defensive alliance of
the American nations", already stated in 1940 in Havana, whereas the Nazi Germany had just
invaded the Netherlands and a part of France. The strategists of Washington then feared to see
the winners claiming the territories of Caribbean and South America which still depended on
the colonial metropolis. The process of military integration was concretized in 1945, with the
"Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace" of Mexico City, which made
it possible to install a new instrument of regional cooperation, the "Inter-American Treaty of
Reciprocal Assistance" (IATRA): “Resolution VIII of the Inter-American Conference on
Problems of War and Peace, which met in Mexico City, recommended the conclusion of a
treaty to prevent and repel threats and acts of aggression against any of the countries of
America”.5 Since this date, the international organization charged to ensure the follow-up of
the military businesses and the security of the American States is the Inter-American Defence
Board (IADB), whose effective creation dates back to 1942 (Conference of Rio de Janeiro).
However, with the Cold War, divides had be accentuated between underdeveloped or “wrong
developed” Latin America countries, sometimes inclined to socialist model, and North
America propped up on its richness and its principles, for which the defence of the sub-
continent against the appetite of the old colonial powers was not any more a strategic priority.
Direct or indirect military interventions intended to restore the order or to eliminate the
communist threat, poisoned the relations between the United States and the Latin-American

3
“Here they are”, “they aren’t here”, “They are maybe here”…
4
The state of mind which pushes the Mexicans to hate and adore their conquerors bears a name, the
"malinchism", in remembering Malinche, this Indian Aztec who helped Hernán Cortés to conquer Tenochtitlán,
while being used to him of mistress and interpreter.
5
http://www.oas.org/juridico/english/Treaties/b-29.html

2
nations placed in fact under their protectorate - since the occupation of Haiti (1915-1934),
until the operation "Just Cause", launched in December 1989 in Panama against the general
Noriega.6
Attacks of September 11 remembered Latin-American community that the IATRA
systematically engaged them at the side of the United States in case of war, which led many
members of Parliament, in Mexico or elsewhere, to claim the revision of a text worked out in
an outdated geopolitical context. Already in 1948, at the time of the creation of the
Organization of the American States (OAS), voices had protested against the maintenance of
a permanent organization of defence directly related to the activities of the new organization.
These criticisms did not prevent the United States from ensuring the direction of Inter-
American Defence Board, whose seat is in Washington, as principal partner and a backer.
Military alliance became thus the keystone of continental stability, by guaranteeing civil
peace, the well-being of the populations, the development of the democracy and the
eradication of Communism in all the Member States (Summit of Washington, 1951).
The international context having changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
disappearance of the Soviet threat, the IADB was directed towards more "humanitarian"
activities: mine clearance in countries affected by civil war (more particularly in Central
America), prevention and management of natural disasters, war against the traffic of drugs...
However, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance was never renegotiated and
continuous to bind the Latin-American countries to the planetary and often discussed destiny
of the United States. This is why the reactions of the street or the national Latin-American
Assemblies, in the south of Rio Grande, should not be taken thoughtlessly, as the attacks of
September 11, 2001 demonstrated it. At a time when the United States wants to carry out a
great Free trade area of America, making null and void the current processes of regional
integration (NAFTA, Mercosur, Andean Community...), the gap between North and the South
is not filled yet - one can even consider that it is wider than never. Question is to know if the
greatest military power in the world really needs its South American allies, or if it can be
satisfied with the comprehension and the sympathy of governments which take part, with
more or less of enthusiasm, with the activities of Inter-American Defence Board.
Another question remains posed. It is double and largely exceeds the case of America and the
war against the terrorists of Al-Qaida. Why and how the North-American government could
be surprised by the attacks planed by Bin Laden? Glossing on military and strategic
considerations of which we have little information isn’t the role of the Cahiers des Amériques
latines. Nevertheless, it comes out from these events that the strategists of the Pentagon and
the experts of the CIA have made, as far as I am concerned, two great errors: that to ignore
the culture and way of life of Arab and Middle East countries, and that to have maintained a
blind confidence towards the technological tools which were used as virtual shield.
This attitude, too often common in the countries known as "developed", is not only a source
of weakness but more especially of incomprehension towards countries of the geopolitical
"South". It must forces us to re-examine the scientific policies shaped within the framework
of the "cultural studies", whose validity is often discussed by the university and research
institutions. Indeed, in spite of the undeniable effects of globalization, or precisely because of
these effects, identity claims, on regional, national, continental or transcontinental scales are
increasingly virulent (it is particularly the case of Islam). The ambiguous reaction of many
Latinos, at the time of the attacks of September 11, cannot be only attributed to heritages of
the history, or to the eternal jealousy of "weak" against the "powerful ones". In spite of the
diffusion of North-American model of development all over "the Western hemisphere", Rio
Grande remains a line of strong divide between two worlds which, actually, don’t know much
6
Without counting the invasion of Haiti (1994), committed under the authority of the United Nations to restore
president Aristide in his functions, after the military coup which had driven him out of power.

3
about each other. This is why a thorough and detailed work on the new borders of cultural
areas, and on the sense which should be granted to them, is necessary today to understand a
"world system" made up of many subsets all the more blurred that we don’t make the effort to
study them.
If the first interrogation relates to the object of research, the second one opens questions of
method. The technological fascination which seized the CIA’s agents threatens us all, and
sometimes leads us to confuse the goal of the research with the tool used to reach that point. If
the geographer does not any more think moreover "with his feet", to remember the expression
of our old Masters, the computer should not exempt him to work in the field. To breathe the
air of the street, to feel the smells of kitchens and gutters, to speak with the crossroad’s cop or
the shepherd are not folk activities, which we henceforth ought to relegate in the underground
storerooms of the ex-Musée de l’Homme (Mankind Museum of Paris), with the faded Inca
clothes and the Arumbaya fetishes (Hergé, 1947). Mapinfo doesn’t solve all the problems,
doesn’t answer all the questions, just like the best spy satellites cannot account for the coffee
conversations or the confidences between old friends and good fathers of family.
It is not a question for social sciences to privilege a tool of research than another, a scale of
analysis rather than another, an object of study rather than another, but rather not to forget that
all the scales are significant because by modifying our prospects for work they enable us to
vary the problematics which result from this change; all the tools are useful, because they are
complementary; all the objects are worthy of interest because they put to the test the whole of
our perceptions, interpretations and knowledge. Why does one have to be interested in the
cultural studies and areas? Above all, because they exist. However, Latin America exists,
even if "the Western hemisphere" is also a geopolitical, economic and cultural reality, and
even if this "Extreme Occident", as Alain Rouquié (1987) said it, is only one reformulated
extension of old Europe, whose definition is neither completely geographical, nor entirely
cultural. On each level of interpretation, the scale of analysis changes, not the object of study.
In its Géographie Universelle, Élisée Reclus wrote: "it is in the remainder of the Spanish
America and especially in Europe, in the motherland and even in this ground of France which,
recently still, sent armies to subjugate them, that the Mexicans seek their allies. They think
and feel 'Latins' [... ]. If ever, on the freed ground, peoples gather together, in spite of the
distances, according to their relationship and their natural affinities, it is to their Latin brothers
of Europe that the Mexicans and others 'latinos' of America will join" (Reclus, 1894: 16). By
quickly discarding the hypothesis of a cultural and linguistic conquest of America by the
United States, the libertarian geographer was mistaken, plugged by its political engagement at
the side of Latin-American peoples threatened by the strong appetite of the young North-
American republic, just come out the formative cocoon of the American Civil War. However,
in a completely different international context, whereas the existence of a Mexamerica located
on both sides of the US/Mexican border isn’t any more an object of controversy, the real or
supposed "Latinity" of South America still tries to be defined by comparison with the Great
Northern Neighbour.
From this point of view, the Cahiers des Amériques latines have an essential role to play: to
avoid losing the contact with nations which need the glance of the others to exist, just like we
need them for better locating us in the new world system. Our task is to design the borders of
the studied area: according to the scale, the moment, the problems or the tool used to analyze
them, these borders can and must move in order to take into account not only realities, but
also images or representations of a cultural area with variable geometry.

Bibliography

Hergé, 1947, Tintin : L'oreille cassée. Casterman.

4
Reclus, Élisée, 1994, Nouvelle géographie universelle, livre XVII, "Indes occidentales".
Paris, Hachette.
Rouquié, Alain, 1987, Amérique latine, introduction à l'Extrême-Occident. Paris, Le Seuil.
Whitaker, Arthur, 1954, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline. Ithaca, New
York, Cornell University Press.