La nouvelle Amérique latine

Since the beginning of the 1980s, most Latin American countries have experienced profound changes. They have experimented with the implementation of innovative public policies, in particular on the social and environmental level. New elites have emerged everywhere, new political parties have been created and hitherto unseen social movements were born.

Whether we are speaking of Brazilian 'participatory democracy', the social policy of 'conditional cash transfers' adopted by the city of New York and which the World Bank is seeking to spread to all ‘emerging’ nations, or even Bolivia’s multi-culturalism and ‘consociative democracy’, Latin America’s political and legal innovations are important food for thought.

After two centuries of political, economic and cultural exchanges predominantly oriented from the North (the United States) towards the South and from the East (Europe) towards the West, the flow of circulating information is perhaps reversing its course: Latin America indeed appears to have become a ‘political laboratory’ for the West.