scholarly journals The Shaping of EU-Mercosur Relations: From Altruism to Pragmatism and Liberalism to Illiberalism

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marie Dudek

Deeply-embedded norms of liberalism and protectionism alongside EU policies focusing on promoting development and regional integration have shaped EU-Mercosur relations.  These stand in stark contrast to the policies of the US, the historic hegemon in the region. This paper utilizes historical institutionalism to understand how the liberal tenets of EU competition policy and the protectionism of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) have affected EU-Mercosur relations. Particular foci include Spain’s role in spearheading efforts to promote EU-Latin American relations and the way EU competition policies directed against monopolies in Europe spurred increased investment in Latin America, especially the Southern Cone.  The latter prompted the EU to forge closer ties with Mercosur, encouraged cooperation and development programs and spurred regional integration and liberal trade regimes in Latin America.

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (199) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
María Victoria Alvarez

Literature on opposition to regional integration has concentrated on the European Union (EU). So far, very few systematic attempts have been pursued to explain opposition to regional integration in Latin America or to identify its main influential factors. Based on Latinobarometer surveys, two main findings emerge from this paper. First, it confirms that opposition to regional integration is not a generalised attitude among Latin Americans. Secondly, the way in which citizens across Latin America evaluate regional integration is strongly influenced by the same predictors as in the EU. Together, citizens’ assessments of economic performance (both at the individual and national level) enjoy a preponderance to account for their position regarding regionalism. Others variables, i.e. age, ideological position, and level of education have a more limited explanatory value while occupation is not significant. Thus, economic variables such as citizens’ perceptions of their national and individual economy have proven to be directly linked to support for/opposition to economic integration.


2005 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
John AE Vervaele

In the period between 1980 and 1995, both Europe and the US made huge investments in Latin America. The process of democratization in Latin America, especially in the countries marked by a tradition of military dictatorship, has reinforced the belief in political and economic stability. The economy has displayed considerable growth and, partly stimulated by the IMF and the World Bank, several countries are embarking on privatization on a grand scale.2 Political and economic cooperation between the countries is taking the place of political and military rivalry. The time is ripe for a new attempt at integration on this continent. The overtures between Argentina and Brazil led to the establishment of Mercosur. Its economic (Mercosur is the fourth largest trade bloc in the world after the US, the EU, and Japan) and political importance have been recognized, especially by the EU. As early as 1996,3 an Interinstitutional Cooperation Agreement was concluded, an interregional framework agreement for cooperation between the EU Member States and Mercosur States parties.4 Since then, the EU-Mercosur Bi-regional Negotiations Committee (BNC)5 has already had ten meetings at which topics such as the free movement of goods, public procurement, investments, services, e-commerce, and conflict resolution were discussed. The US has never appreciated the attempts at integration in Latin America and has always striven to conclude separate free trade agreements with each individual country. The recent free trade agreement with Chile is a clear example.6


Author(s):  
Ilona Gritsenko

The paper outlines the contours of modern competitive interaction between the United States and the European Union in Latin America. Based on the Latin American country strategies of the US State Department and the European Commission documents, the author traces the priorities of the above mentioned global players in the region, highlighting those of them that are areas of conflict of interests between the US and the EU. Special attention is paid to the differences and commonalities in their approaches to topical issues and problematic items of the Latin American agenda.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-115
Author(s):  
Oleg KARPOVICH

. In the XXI century, cardinal changes continue in the financial and economic situation of Latin America. New influential non-regional partners besides the US and the EU, China, Iran, India, Russia, have come to the fore, significantly expanding the range of foreign relations of Latin American and Caribbean countries, which significantly increases the role of Latin America in the international arena. In economic terms, Latin America is experiencing a period of increased international dynamics, characterized by the intensification of intraregional interactions and the search for new non-regional partners and markets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-23
Author(s):  
W. A. Sánchez

Brazil has historically been regarded as the natural leader of Latin America, given its level of development, the size of its economy, its military might and its ambitious foreign policy. This image was cemented during the presidencies of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, who supported Latin American integration (particularly via the creation of such blocs as UNASUR and CELAC) and diminishing Washington’s historical influence in the Western Hemisphere. However, the situation has dramatically changed with the rise to power of President Jair Bolsonaro, a staunch supporter of the US in general (and President Donald Trump in particular), which has affected Brazil’s role in the region. Based upon the analysis of specific domestic and foreign policy components, the author draws conclusions on how Brazil’s prospects as a participant (or even the key motivator) in the transformation processes in the region have changed. Brazil is no longer perceived as the axis of attempts at regional integration, but rather “just another separate state” taking care of its own interests. Brazil’s economic crisis and Bolsonaro’s strategy (or the lack thereof) regarding the COVID-19 pandemic have negatively affected Brazil’s image even further. Then again, as this analysis seeks to demonstrate, Latin America has a mixed record when it comes to integration attempts, as regional governments are zealous guardians of national sovereignty. Hence, while there have been some successful regional thrivings towards promoting cooperation, the rise of some supranationalist organization similar to the European Union – is a dream. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as Latin American (and Caribbean) blocs do not need supranationalism to be effective, but it shows the limits of regional integration initiatives.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Casarões

The institutional framework of Latin American integration saw a period of intense transformation in the 2000s, with the death of the ambitious project of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), spearheaded by the United States, and the birth of two new institutions, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This article offers a historical reconstruction of regional integration structures in the 2000s, with emphasis on the fault lines between Brazil, Venezuela and the US, and how they have shaped the institutional order across the hemisphere. We argue that the shaping of UNASUR and CELAC, launched respectively in 2007 and 2010, is the outcome of three complex processes: (1) Brazil’s struggle to strengthen Mercosur by acting more decisively as a regional paymaster; (2) Washington’s selective engagement with some key regional players, notably Colombia, and (3) Venezuela’s construction of an alternative integration model through the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) and oil diplomacy. If UNASUR corresponded to Brazil’s strategy to neutralize the growing role of Caracas in South America and to break apart the emerging alliance between Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia, CELAC was at the same time a means to keep the US away from regional decisions, and to weaken the Caracas-Havana axis that sustained ALBA.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sidney Xu Lu

Abstract This article explains how the US westward expansion influenced and stimulated Japanese migration to Brazil. Emerging in the nineteenth century as expanding powers in East Asia and Latin America, respectively, both Meiji Japan and post-independence Brazil looked to the US westward expansion as a central reference for their own processes of settler colonialism. The convergence of Japan and Brazil in their imitation of US settler colonialism eventually brought the two sides together at the turn of the twentieth century to negotiate for the start of Japanese migration to Brazil. This article challenges the current understanding of Japanese migration to Brazil, conventionally regarded as a topic of Latin American ethnic studies, by placing it in the context of settler colonialism in both Japanese and Brazilian histories. The study also explores the shared experiences of East Asia and Latin America as they felt the global impact of the American westward expansion.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nubia Muñoz

It is too early to know which will be the final death toll from the Covid-19 or SARS-CoV-2 virus epidemy in Latin America since the epidemy is still active and we will not know when it will end. The curve for new infections and deaths has not reached yet a peak (Figure 1). In addition, we know little about the epidemiology of this new virus. The daily litany of the number of people infected with the number of admissions to hospitals and intensive care units and the number of deaths guides health authorities to plan health services and politicians to gauge the degree of confinement necessary to control the transmission of the virus, but it says little about the magnitude of the problem if we do not relate it to the population at risk. At the end of the pandemic, we will be able to estimate age-standardized death rates for the different countries, but until then the crude death rates will provide a first glance or snapshot of the death toll and impact of the pandemic from March to May 2020. These rates are well below those estimated in other countries in Europe and North America: Belgium (82.6), Spain (58.0), the United Kingdom (57.5), Italy (55.0), France (42.9), Sweden (41.4), and the US (30.7). (Johns Hopkins CSSE, May 30, 2020). However, in the European countries and the US the number of deaths has reached a peak, while this is not the case in Latin American countries. (Figure 1). It should be taken into account that the above rates are crude and therefore, some of the differences could be due to the fact that European countries have a larger proportion of the population over 70 years of age in whom higher mortality rates have been reported.


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