Introduction

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) represented one of the most ambitious regional governance projects of the post-Cold War era. It was ambitious not only in terms of the geographical scope of the zone that would have been established, one that spanned the entire Western Hemisphere, but more important, in terms of the variation in the characteristics of the different participating countries. Specifically, the FTAA encompassed some the world’s most developed economies as well as some of its poorest, underdeveloped economies. For example, in 2005, the year the FTAA negotiations collapsed, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in millions of the combined states of South America, the Caribbean, and Central America amounted to US$2,698,103, while the GDP of the United States alone amounted to US$12,665,857.1 These differences were limited to not only objective criteria such as GDP but also significant subjective ones, such as historical experience and identity. Therefore, the negotiation of the FTAA was made up of a group of unlikely, dissimilar, and, in some cases, distant participants.