In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Venezuelan Politics and Foreign Policy

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International Relations Venezuelan Politics and Foreign Policy
by
David Smilde, Dustin Robertson
  • LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0328

Introduction

Through most of its existence, Venezuela’s place in international relations has exceeded what might be expected from a mid-sized state on the global periphery. Simón Bolívar’s continental independence drives began in Venezuela and this regional leadership has long been a central element of Venezuelan national sentiment. Venezuela’s location at the northern edge of South America and the southern edge of the Caribbean gave it strategic importance to the powers of the Global North in the nineteenth century. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves made its geopolitical importance soar in the middle of the twentieth century. And Venezuela’s 1958 democracy resisted the collapse of other second-wave democracies and became a reference point for the region, as a Cold War counterpoint to Cuba. These elements: regional leadership, location, oil, and democracy have run through Venezuelan politics and foreign policy throughout its existence as a country, despite dramatic shifts in policies and allies in recent decades. This bibliography focuses not on foreign policy toward Venezuela but on Venezuela’s foreign policy, dipping into Venezuela’s politics to the degree that it is necessary for understanding its foreign policy.

Continuities and Periodization

One of the long-term points of difference and debates among Venezuela scholars is the degree of continuity versus change in Venezuelan history. Here we capture both approaches with a first section looking at texts that address the sweep of Venezuelan history and the long-term trends in its politics and foreign policy, some looking at the continuity provided by oil exploitation, others at the long-term tendency toward political conflict and violence. The next five sections include scholarship that focuses on specific periods in Venezuelan history. In the period before oil exploitation began Venezuela was largely dominated by conflict and its foreign policy by postcolonial powers. After oil exploitation began but before democracy emerged in the 20th-century Venezuela’s international importance increased with foreign oil companies shifting from Mexico to Venezuela. With the onset of Punto Fijo democracy in 1958 a more complex period began as Venezuela became a democratic counterpoint to the Cuban Revolution. Perhaps the most important period in Venezuela’s foreign policy came during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. The ample literature on this period looks at the significance of Chávez’s rhetoric, embedding it in Venezuela’s national and geopolitical interests, and seeks to understand the logic of Chávez’s foreign policy in terms of varying forms of balancing, its efforts to preserve its sovereignty by generating a new structure of multi-lateral organizations, as well as how Chávez’s foreign policy was itself the subject of vigorous conflict and condemnation.

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