Latin American regionalism towards the second decade of the 21st century: refraining from integration and revisiting power coalitions

• In Event: Comparative Regionalism

Abstract

From 2008 onwards, when the shift to the left wing in Latin America was consolidated, the main processes of regional integration, namely Mercosur and Andean Community of Nations, reach a stagnation point that was not previously intended and foreshadowed by these organizations goals, originally inspired in liberal ideas. As a hypothesis to explain such a fact, one may argue that the elements of rational search for development and autonomy brought back Third World visions and an appeal to neostructuralism into countries like Brazil and Argentina. This amounts to saying that, in contrast to the neoliberal orientation of the 1990s, which took over the Latin American international agenda almost fully, policies directed at neighboring spaces at the beginning of the 21st century reproduce a realist approach that blocks and slows down the deepening of regional integration. Hence, the occurrence of this aforementioned shift is presented as a resurgence of intergovernmental politics and nationalism, in the form of conventional coalitions of power. Two main questions that aim to understand what caused the back to Latin American intergovernmentalism (or abandonment of a former project toward supranationalism) can be thus posed, which are as follows: how does the regional dynamic impact the strategic insertion of a coalition? And, what is the influence of this new regional space form in today s global governance?

Author

• Fabrício H Chagas Bastos, Australian National University