ABSTRACT
In twentieth-century Latin America, full national sovereignty came to be imagined as walking upon the two legs of political independence and autonomous economic development. This chapter focuses on the relationship of the nation-state to the modern world-system, understood as a capitalist world-economy organized politically as a group of interrelated states dominated by core powers. Several Mexican respondents identified Mikhail Gorbachev’s loss of power as a pivotal event influencing the character of the post-Cold War order. Several Cubans mentioned increased solidarity from Latin America in the post-Cold War conjuncture as a factor that makes Cuba somewhat less vulnerable to US aggression. The change in the international correlation of forces represented by the disappearance of the Soviet Union was felt much more strongly in Cuba than in Mexico, where the Soviets never had a strong presence. For many Cuban intellectuals, national politics mediate their views on the realities of globalization, though in this case it is the century-old politics of anti-imperialist nationalism.
