The Balance of Power in Nineteenth-Century South America

Numerous articles, monographs and books have been written about the foreign relations of Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ¹ The bulk of this work has been concerned with the relations of the Great Powers with Latin America, or with the legal aspects of boundary disputes among the Latin American nations or with topics related to international cooperation. Relatively few of these writings have attempted to define the changing national interests of individual Latin American nations or to relate these interests to internal economic and social conditions. Few, if any, writers have sought to provide an integrated pattern for the relations of the Latin American nations among themselves. Both of these deficiencies might be lessened by an investigation into the operation of the balance-of-power principle in Latin America.