9. Latin America’s Interregional Reconfiguration: The Beginning or the End of Latin America’s Continental Integration?

‘Latin America’ has historically been used as a cultural category, originating from the European idea to set it apart from the Protestant, Anglophone former British colonies in the North and to tie them to European ‘Latin’ countries, mainly France (Panlatinism). However, with time the context and framing of its use have changed both in the ‘Latin American world’ and globally.

We refer to intra-regional trade as the commercial exchange of goods and services within states of the same ‘region’. Extra-regional trade is therefore trade with a state outside of a chosen region. Individual inter-regional trade flows are part of total extra-regional trade (Söderbaum and Van Langenhove, 2013).

Apart from the continuing barriers represented by the Andes, the Amazon and the rest of the vast continental deep interior, analysts also point to the uniqueness of the South American hinterland which, along its Southern Atlantic counterpart in Africa, has never been as porous to global flows, or as accessible to governance, as have the Great Plains of North America, the northern-central plains of the European subcontinent, or even the great Heartland of Eurasia (Botafogo and Oliveira 2013).

EU relations is of course is the prominent exception (see Ayuso and Gardini in this volume).

One can make the case that other aspects of global economic activity, including investment balances and flows, corporate and supply-chain structures, and technological advances should also be considered key drivers of regionalisms and regional dynamics, but we do not treat these here, at least not directly, for reasons of space, time and resources. See Ayuso and Gardini in this volume for a discussion of waves of Latin American regional integration.

Chile, Peru and Mexico have all signed the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), while Colombia announced interest in signing the TPP back in 2010.

The future of the TPP has been clouded with uncertainty since Donald Trump, President of the US, signed an executive order on January 23, 2017 which withdrew the US from the trade agreement. Nevertheless, it remains more than possible that a transpacific trade agreement will come into being, sooner or later. It could be a TPP which initially does not involve the US. China could also sign the TPP – possibly provoking a future US administration to return to it as well – or it could take advantage of the moment to consolidate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a pan-Asian regional trade agreement which is not as deep or as wide-embracing as the TPP and does not include any transpacific partners from the Americas. The TPP includes: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States (until January 23, 2017) and Vietnam. The RCEP includes: the ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam) and the six states with which ASEAN has existing free trade agreements (Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand).

UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, is one such continental project. Signed in 2008, the agreement intends to unite the already consolidated agreements of Mercosur and the Andean Community into one agreement that features the rules of the regional trade accords of both, within a Mercosur-style overarching political structure for common policies, including regional security issues and a regional development bank. The key to the UNASUR project is overlapping membership by Bolivia and Venezuela. Mexico and Panama serve as outside observers.

Mexico is included in the North American region, as its main source of imports and market for exports remains the US, both through NAFTA.

See Marcia Stanton, “The Worth of the Deep Blue,” Namib Times , April 27, 2013 (http://​www.​namibtimes.​net/​forum/​topics/​the-worth-of-the-deep-blue), and Global Ocean Commission, “Petitioning Ban Ki-moon: Help secure a living ocean, food and prosperity – propose a new agreement for high seas protection” September 2014. (https://​www.​change.​org/​en-GB/​petitions/​ban-ki-moon-help-secure-a-living-ocean-food-and-prosperity-propose-a-new-agreement-for-high-seas-protection-in-september-2014).

According to Pitta e Cunha (2014), a World Bank study undertaken in 2008 estimated that the total annual value of all marine ecosystem services, globally, and for which there already existed a market, was US$20 trillion, equivalent to about 33% of a nominal Global GDP at the time of around US$60 trillion.

The Arctic Basin is one of the inevitable ‘blind spots’ of this version of the ocean basin projection. However, we have only ignored the Arctic Basin because of very limiting data and methodological constraints. In particular, to build our regional mapping model of global flows to include the Arctic as the ‘fourth basin’ would require a category for ‘tri-basin countries,’ and much more complex structures and coding within the model. Given these short-term limitations, together with the fact that the Arctic has not yet truly opened to global flows, it has been sacrificed in this initial version of the projection.

While we believe that this new conceptualization is a more valid and universal construction, we also acknowledge that we are only advocating substituting one paradigm for another.

Both states’ opposition to the FTAA is a notable exception.

See footnote 8, above.

See footnote 8, above.