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Constructing regionalism in South America: the role of ideas in the Andean Community and Mercosur Projects
Abstract
As an alternative to materialist explanations of regionalism in South America, this essay offers a constructivist approach that assesses the constitutive role of ideas related to collective identity, collective knowledge and structure of roles as three ideational variables to understand the engagement of South American states with the Andean Community and Mercosur regionalist projects. According to these variables, which are taken from A. Wendt’s study of international culture, this essay addresses four sources of collective identity ?interdependence, common fate, homogeneity and self-restraint— and explains the structure of collective knowledge constituted by neo-liberalism and the strategy of ‘open regionalism’. It also assesses the structure of rules that defines the types of international culture of anarchy present in South American regionalist projects. The essay shows the ability of the constructivist approach to explain the development of these projects amidst low levels of regional cohesion, highlighting ideational dimensions often dismissed by materialist analysis
... In that perspective, some argued that regions had to be rather considered as social and political spaces, plagued by constant redefinitions or reinterpretations (Hameiri, 2013). However, very few scholars specialized on extra-European regionalisms have explored more in detail the social power relations beyond institutional embodiments and formal ROs (Nair, 2019;Prieto, 2003). ...
... The NRA promoted the inclusion in the analysis of a wider spectrum of actors, private and public actors at multiple levels (national, regional, international). In line with this, ideas and collective identities have become more important to understand why states orientate toward regional cooperation or how regional norms are shaped (Duina, 2006, Prieto, 2003, Puntigliano & Briceño-Ruiz, 2013. Scarcely applied, constructivist studies suffer from understanding LA regionalisms from above. ...
Regionalisms and regional organizations quickly unfold since the end of the twentieth century and have increased their actorness. The early outlines of a shifting global order have been tainted by an increasing regionalization of international phenomena. Though, regions, regionalisms and regional organizations are constantly put into question as pertinent objects to grab international politics. The difficulties to grasp common ontological and epistemological approximations of the regional phenomena limited the capacity to take those objects into better account. The chapter argues that a middle path approach between International Relations and Area Studies can help overcoming these hurdles. A political sociology approach applied to the study of regions, regionalisms, and regional organizations is useful and meaningful to connect international relations theories and area studies. In this chapter, I apply this approach to a specific world region, Latin America, and to a narrower exploration of the Central American regionalism. This single-case study will be helpful to extend avenues for future comparative research.
... In terms of trade and investment, the utility of regionalism was the conformity that it signalled with a set ofperceived economic imperatives, not for the purpose of increasing economic exchange with direct neighbours but rather for increasing 'credibility' in order to stimulate extra-regional investment. lnasmuch as regionalism was in part a political statement associated with a broad convergence on a set of neoliberal policy reforms in the 1990s, it was deemed lO constitute a vital signal that would enhance the insertion of Latin American economies into global commercial and financial markets (Prieto 2003). In other parl, the focus on regionalism was to address the pronounced lack of competitiveness of the majority of export sectors and products in global markets. ...
... However, much of the earlier enthusiasm about the prospects for a genuine regionalization of civil society activity has waned along with the formal regionalist projects around which they coalesced. The record of regionalized cooperation between civil society groups was in any event very patchy and somewhat tepid over the course of the 1990s, and one of the key characteristics of regionalism in Latin America has remained the lack of extensive civil society participation (Prieto 2008). ...
With the earIy flourishes of new regionalism in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, and the initial successes of new or revitalized integration projects, it was widely thought that regionalism had become entrenched as a structural force and a political commitment in the political economy of the region. While the various regional blocs on the whole did not feature the political ambition of European integration, the talk was of the emergence of a key strategy for achieving an enormous range of goals: participating effectively in the globalizing world economy, harnessing the benefits of globalization, mitigating the deleterious impact of globalization, enhancing the competitiveness of the region's export sectors and products, providing a platform for collective negotiation and therefore achieving greater weight in international and multilateral bargaining processes, addressing the region's profound social problems and, not least, countering the dominance of the United States in the region and other powerful actors in multilateral and international arenas.
... Scholarship has emphasised the role of the Bolivarian ideal as an important source of collective identity. According to Prieto (2003), while no official initiatives have promoted a Bolivarian legacy, 'the history of independence and the greatness of "el Libertador" constitute a strong referent of identity in official discourse ' (2003, p. 283). References to Bolivarian legacy significantly increased in the Andean declarations between 1999 and 2006, when Hugo Chávez was the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, until the country left the regional block. ...
... While the previous existence of a sense of collective identity might have been present at the moment of creating regional projects like the Central American Common Market, the Andean Pact (currently Andean Community), and the Mercosur (Prieto, 2003), the remaining of this article focuses on the socialization effects that the institutional structures of the AC and the UNASUR may have triggered among national and regional bureaucrats, in order to assess the relationship between regional institutions and identity building. It will be argued that the AC stands out as a case where the strength of regional institutions, together with a much-grounded collective identity, has allowed for the maintenance of the regionalist project despite facing certain crises and falling into a deep demise in the 2010s, while the institutional weakness of UNASUR and the lack of a strong collective identity might explain why the regionalist project was dismantled when it faced its first institutional crisis. ...
The relationship between identity and institutions has traditionally been a main explanatory factor of the unfolding of regionalism from a constructivist lens. Yet, this relationship has not been largely addressed in the study of regionalism in Latin America, where collective identity is often expected to be strong, but regional institutions are often considered weak. The relationship between institutional flexibility and inertia with collective identity can be illustrated by the cases of the Andean Community (AC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), where due to harsh disagreement between member states about crucial issues, these regionalist projects risked being thrown into question or even terminated. The AC has stronger institutionalization than UNASUR. Analysis of the AC shows that institutional flexibility and inertia, articulated with certain dimensions of Andean collective identity and even triggering identification effects among member states, helped overcome certain critical moments. First, Peru’s reluctance to adopt certain commercial schemes for meeting the project’s aim of constituting a common market led the other AC members to consider expelling Peru from the regional scheme, but institutional flexibility and inertia, along with issues of collective identity, allowed Peru to remain an AC member. Second, Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s abandoning of collective FTA negotiations with the EU could have implied dismantling the regionalist project due to the impossibility of it acting as a bloc in the trade area, but the relationship between institutional flexibility and inertia with collective identity enabled maintaining the project and handling the critical moment successfully. In contrast, while the disagreement around the constitution of the Banco del Sur did not endanger the creation of UNASUR and later its continuity, mainly thanks to institutional flexibility though not so much to institutional inertia, the lack of a strong collective identity, together with the lack of institutional inertia, made the regionalist project fail in facing its first profound crisis regarding diplomatic conflict among its members around the legitimacy of Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela, despite but also due to the huge institutional flexibility that had persuaded member states to join UNASUR in the first place.
... El curso de la integración andina fue golpeado fuertemente por la crisis de la deuda en la primera mitad de la década de 1980, y no fue sino hasta 1987 -año en el que se reformuló el Acuerdo de Cartagena, por medio del Protocolo de Quito-cuando se dio un primer paso para oxigenar al Pacto Andino dándole un nuevo marco conceptual y mayor flexibilidad (Bulla, 2001). Este nuevo impulso de finales de los años ochenta del siglo XX al Pacto Andino puede entenderse, en el marco del nuevo regionalismo abierto que surgió en América Latina, como resultado de la transición de la región hacia la democracia y el neoliberalismo (Cepeda, 2019;Prieto, 2003). Colombia y Venezuela fueron los dos grandes impulsores de la Zona Andina de Libre Comercio y del Arancel Externo Común; ambos, considerados herramientas clave para alcanzar el mercado común andino previsto para finales del siglo XX (Prieto, 2016, cap. ...
Mucho se ha escrito sobre la alternancia de Colombia entre dos directrices de política exterior: el respice polum y el respice similia. Pero son más bien escasos los trabajos que analizan estas directrices en relación con sus actuaciones frente a los distintos procesos y proyectos de integración regional en los que el país se ha visto involucrado en América Latina. Este artículo ofrece una contribución para llenar este vacío, a través de una mirada longitudinal de la actuación de Colombia en dichos proyectos, buscando mostrar que, si bien la prelación hacia Estados Unidos ha predominado en muchos momentos, en el país también ha habido iniciativas para liderar procesos de cara al fortalecimiento de la integración y la cooperación regionales.
... El regionalismo abierto fue también una estrategia para identificarse con Occidente y su proyecto liberal. Un claro mensaje hacia el resto del mundo, y sobre todo a Europa y a Estados Unidos, de que se podía contar con América Latina para adelantar el proyecto globalizador de consolidar el libre comercio a nivel mundial (Prieto, 2003). Con el nuevo regionalismo de los noventa, los países latinoamericanos confirmaban la importancia de los proyectos regionales como herramientas de identificación y de proyección hacia el mundo. ...
Desde su creación, la Alianza del Pacífico, AP, se viene proclamando a sí misma como un proyecto innovador que aspira a convertirse en un referente histórico del regionalismo latinoamericano. Sus líderes aclaman el 'pragmatismo' de la Alianza como algo muy novedoso, cuya innovación constituye además una clave para su éxito. Sin embargo, aun reconociendo algunos rasgos de originalidad de este nuevo proyecto regional, su innovación y el éxito asociado a ella merecen ser discutidos por dos razones: en primer lugar, para comprender cuál es el papel de la AP dentro de la historia del regionalismo y del ordenamiento regional de América Latina; y segundo, para examinar la viabilidad de la AP en términos de qué tanto su carácter innovador puede ayudarle a alcanzar sus objetivos.
Introducción Dentro del contexto regional latinoamericano, y particularmente del suramericano, Chile se ha destacado por llevar a cabo un proceso de " internacionalización temprana " con respecto a los demás países. Su articulación con el desarrollismo que imperaba en la región en los años sesenta, coronada por su participación como miembro fundador del Acuerdo de Cartagena (Pacto Andino) en 1969, se vio truncada por la dictadura de Pinochet instalada desde 1973 , que impondría un cambio del modelo económico desarrollista hacia uno neoliberal donde la apertura comercial era la punta de lanza para el desarrollo y crecimiento económico. Este nuevo modelo requería del establecimiento de nexos comerciales con países que pudiesen demandar las principales exportaciones chilenas, basadas esencialmente en productos primarios como el cobre, las frutas, productos forestales y madera, pesca y productos marinos (Meller, 1996, p. 64). Sin embargo, ante las críticas de los países vecinos, hemisféricos y europeos, el régimen militar tuvo que enfrentar una situación de aislamiento internacional que lo llevó a buscar mercados e interlo-cutores políticos en Asia-Pacífico.
This article assesses the ways in which regional institutions, understood as norms and institutional bodies, contribute to the formation of collective identity in the Andean Community (AC). Departing from the previous existence of an Andean identity, grounded on historical and cultural issues, the paper takes three case studies to show the terms in which regional institutions contribute to the formation of three dimensions of collective identity in the AC. Namely, these are the cultural, ideological, and inter-group dimensions. The paper shows that although the ideas held about an Andean collective identity by state representatives and Andean General Secretariat (AGS) bureaucrats hold are very diverse, the AC institutional framework provides a strong basis for the emergence of collective identity among member states. Three explanations are provided in this regard: First, the benefits obtained from Andean norms and regional institutional organisms make states identify with the regionalist project and with each other. Second, regional organisms provide spaces for state interaction where state representatives learn from each other and identify between them. Third, the AGS operates as an independent agent that exerts pressure over member states to keep the pace of regionalism. The paper argues that these explanations account for an effect of ‘institutional inertia’ that has helped to maintain the AC regionalist project.
Constructivist approaches to regionalism underscore the role of identity and institutions in explaining the unfolding of regionalist projects. Constructivism emphasizes relationships of mutual reinforcement between collective identity and regional institutions once these institutions are created. Identity and institutions are often seen as mutually constituted and caused, but constructivist analyses of regionalism conceptualize these relationships in different manners. Through revising the ontological differentiation between relationships of constitution and causation, this paper shows that constructivism faces serious challenges in providing explanations for the unfolding of regionalism. This paper reviews a number of constructivist approaches that conceptualize in different ways the relationships of constitution and causation between collective identity and regional institutions. While some approaches suggest that regional institutions can be caused by a pre-existing collective identity, some others assert that collective identity can be caused by the creation of regional institutions, where the causes of such creation remain open to other factors. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the capability of constructivism to simultaneously provide constitutive and causal explanations for the unfolding of regionalism. The paper shows that constructivist approaches to regionalism tend to be confusing in the differentiation between constitution and causation, and the consequence is that constructivism usually falls into ‘under-explanation’ or ‘under-specification’ in meeting the end of ‘explaining’ why and how regionalism unfolds. In turn, the paper suggests that constructivism needs to broaden and specify more deeply the conceptualization of causal relationships in this case in order to provide better explanations for the ways in which regionalism develops.
Drawing upon philosophy and social theory, Social Theory of International Politics develops a theory of the international system as a social construction. Alexander Wendt clarifies the central claims of the constructivist approach, presenting a structural and idealist worldview which contrasts with the individualism and materialism which underpins much mainstream international relations theory. He builds a cultural theory of international politics, which takes whether states view each other as enemies, rivals or friends as a fundamental determinant. Wendt characterises these roles as 'cultures of anarchy', described as Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian respectively. These cultures are shared ideas which help shape state interests and capabilities, and generate tendencies in the international system. The book describes four factors which can drive structural change from one culture to another - interdependence, common fate, homogenization, and self-restraint - and examines the effects of capitalism and democracy in the emergence of a Kantian culture in the West.
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