Abstract:
The American continent is organised around four major regional economic blocs: North American Free Trade Agreement, the Pacific Alliance, the Southern Common Market and the Andean Community. Their role is crucial today to channel regional cooperation and promote the development of a territory that has great socio-economic contrasts between Anglo and Francophone communities in the North and Latin American areas of the South. The integration of fragmented initiatives and profound local production disruptions in the South, aligned with suspicions and preponderant U.S. commercial interests hinder the prospects for a single economic unit on a continental scale. In this context, the article examines the potential that the most significant supranational organisations have and their geopolitical implications.

Resumen:
El continente americano se organiza básicamente en torno a cuatro grandes bloques económicos regionales: el Tratado de Libre comercio de América del Norte, La Alianza del Pacífico, el Mercado Común del Sur y la Comunidad Andina. Su papel es hoy fundamental para encauzar la cooperación regional e impulsar el desarrollo de un territorio que presenta grandes contrastes socioeconómicos entre las comunidades anglosajonas y francófonas del Norte y los espacios latinoamericanos del Sur, donde las iniciativas de integración fragmentadas y los profundos desajustes productivos locales, unido a los recelos y la preponderancia de los intereses comerciales de Estados Unidos, dificultan un proyecto único de unidad económica a escala continental. En ese contexto se analizan las potencialidades de las organizaciones supranacionales más significativas y sus implicaciones geopolíticas.

Author: Antonio Doval
Spanish Title: Los projectos de cooperación e integración regional en América a principios del siglo XXI
Full document: 2015, Doval, Los Proyectos de Cooperación e Integración Regional en América a Principios del Siglo XXI

Abstract:
The landscape of Latin American regionalism has experienced profound transformations in a relatively short period of time. Regional organizations have proliferated; the open regionalism of the 1990s has gone into decay; new organizations, often referred to as belonging to a new wave of a more political “posthegemonic regionalism,” took center stage; only to be displaced in the attention of observers by newer trade-oriented organizations such as the Pacific Alliance. These developments have been puzzling scholars and policy makers, who for their most part have tended to converge on the view that a fragmented regional configuration with diverging or even incompatible models of regional integration is on the rise.

This article challenges this interpretation by arguing that many of the trends we observe are rather the result of Latin American states’ practical adaptation of their foreign policy strategies to the emergence of a multipolar political economy in the international system. One important consequence of this process of adaptation, I argue, is a “decoupling” of the economic function of regionalism from its other dimensions – a process that I show is facilitating the emergence of a regional architecture characterized by a finer division of labor among organizations.

Author: Jorge F. Garzón
Full document: 2015, Garzón, Latin American Regionalism in a Multipolar World