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Dominican Republic Outside Actors
The Dominican Republic is a relatively small and weak
country, heavily dependent on the outside world
economically and
strategically, and located in the center of one of the
world's
most important areas of East-West and North-South
conflict--the
volatile Caribbean. For these reasons, various outside
actors
have long exercised a significant degree of influence in
the
island nation's internal politics.
In the early nineteenth century, the principal outside
actors
were Spain, France, and Britain; toward the end of the
century,
Germany and the United States had also become involved in
Dominican affairs. Because the Dominican Republic shares
the
island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and because Haiti
represented a
constant threat to the Dominican Republic, both before and
after
the Haitian occupation of 1822-44, Haiti also exerted
significant
influence
(see Dominican Republic - Haiti and Santo Domingo
, ch. 1).
A variety of transnational actors have played a
significant
role in Dominican politics. Transnational actors had no
single
national identity; they transcended national boundaries,
but had
local influence nonetheless. They included multinational
corporations, the Socialist International (the
international
grouping of social democratic parties highly involved in
Dominican affairs during the 1970s and the 1980s), the
Vatican,
the Chamber of Commerce, and the Christian Democratic
International, among others.
Many of these agencies, or the embassies of such
countries as
the United States or Haiti, played a role not only in
Dominican
international affairs, but in the country's internal
affairs as
well. Some of them tried to influence national politics;
they
maintained programs (scholarships, travel awards, etc.) to
attract and to influence young people, labor leaders, and
government officials. In many ways, they functioned almost
like
domestic interest groups. In a small, weak, and dependent
country
like the Dominican Republic, the influence of outside
actors was
often considerable.
Data as of December 1989
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