Interregionalism's impact on regional integration in developing countries: the case of Mercosur

Doctor, Mahrukh

doi:10.1080/13501763.2014.992932

Cited by 19 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In the course of nearly 30 years of mutual negotiations, Mercosur has not become more similar to the EU; important institutional and programmatic developments in Mercosur were not instigated by negotiations with the EU. At best, in some critical phases, negotiations with the EU were one of several factors that kept Mercosur alive, but did not drive its institutional consolidation (Doctor, 2015). Mercosur did not become a mirror image of the EU; rather, it resembled Alice climbing through the looking glass, where everything seemed to conform to expectations when in reality everything was upside down.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mercosur and the Eu: The False Mirror

Nolte

Neto

2021

Lua Nova

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The relations with the European Union (EU) began almost with the Mercosur’s creation. After signing a first framework agreement in 1995, the EU and Mercosur began negotiating a comprehensive interregional partnership with a free trade agreement since 1999. Negotiations were conducted with ups and downs, suspended, and resumed over a period of more than 20 years, and up to Mercosur’s 30th anniversary there is still no free trade agreement ratified with the EU. Based on the broad literature on the relations between the EU and Mercosur (both by European and Latin American authors) and on the analysis of official documents and declarations from the EU and Mercosur, this paper proposes some explanations as to why these negotiations have progressed so slowly and faced so many obstacles.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mercosur and the Eu: The False Mirror

Nolte

Neto

2021

Lua Nova

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“…Yet, a second vision has contended that rather than functioning as a unifying element, the external agenda evidences the limits of the internal agenda of the bloc, and thus works merely as a 'flight forward,' an evasive action which does not really strengthen MERCOSUR (Carranza, 2006, p. 809). Finally, Doctor (2015) presents and discusses a third view, mostly evident among policymakers though weakly developed in the literature (Malamud, 2005;Oelsner, 2013), which claims that the external agenda has, in fact, added more topics and initiatives to the internal agenda, thus straining the regional process of integration.…”

Section: Analysing Regional Integration and Politicization In Latin Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

Politicization and Regional Integration in Latin America: Implications for EU–MERCOSUR Negotiations?

Bianculli

2020

PaG

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Regional integration in Latin America has experienced different periods of politicization. The most recent goes back to the 2000s and is related to the domestic political changes resulting from the so-called ‘left turn’ which sought alternative economic and development policies to neoliberalism as the state regained centrality. These transformations led to a broad process of politicization of regionalism which changed the terms of the debate surrounding whether regional integration and free trade are the only way for these countries to integrate regionally and internationally. Analyses have thus underscored the postliberal character of this phase of regionalism as reflected in the greater weight of social and political agendas at the expense of economic and trade issues. The Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) was no exception to this trend. However, in 2010 the bloc rather surprisingly agreed to relaunch negotiations with the European Union (EU). Why did MERCOSUR decide to resume these negotiations—stalled since 2004—in a context of high politicization of regional integration? This article argues that internal politicization did not lead to a paralysis of the international agenda. Moreover, internal politicization, coupled with external pressures and the demand for group-to-group negotiations by the EU, drove and supported the conduct of international negotiations. In so doing, this article also contests the idea that after the 2000s, MERCOSUR moved inexorably towards a postliberal model, thus rejecting any trade component. Findings suggest that these accounts may have overemphasized change and underestimated continuities in regional integration dynamics as the case of the external agenda shows.

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“…Over the past years, the EU and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) bi-regional relationship has progressively incorporated these commitments in their cooperation relations since the Bi-Regional Strategic Partnership was launched in 1999, translating them into cooperation instruments. Previous literature has significantly explored several aspects of EU-LAC inter-regional relations, such as the commitment to shared global and domestic values, its longstanding, institutionalised and multitier characteristics (Dominguez 2015;Serbin and Pont 2018;Haider and Clemente 2020;Ayuso and Gratius 2021;Jeger et al 2022), the EU Strategic Partnerships set out with Brazil, Mexico and Latin America as a region (Sanahuja 2015;Blanco and Luciano 2018;Meissner 2018;Ayuso 2021;Luciano 2021;Nolte 2023), and the EU agreements established and negotiated with LAC individual and subregional actors (Garcia 2015;Doctor 2015;Dominguez 2020;Bonilla and Sanahuja 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%