The Pink Tide: Counter-Hegemonic Potentials

To this point in the book, I have examined Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and Brazil’s neostructuralism in their domestic settings. Between them, the two countries represent the two leading projects within the Pink Tide, with its other members falling somewhere in between, depending on their own circumstances. The Pink Tide, therefore, is a contested phenomenon, with the Venezuelan and Brazilian projects interacting with each other at the regional level in the process of defining it. This interaction has sparked a process of regional integration, through which the Pink Tide as a whole seeks to construct a new regional historic bloc as an alternative to the neoliberal one imposed in the 1990s. This recalls Robert Cox’s suggestion that the most favourable place to begin a counter-hegemonic struggle against neoliberal hegemony is at the regional level, where there are spaces to construct alternative historic blocs from which global struggles can subsequently be waged (Cox 1992: 40–1). Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to examine the emerging regional historic bloc and explore its counter-hegemonic potentials.