ABSTRACT
What I wish to do here is not only to take issue with the idea that the Mercosur is at death’s door but also to suggest that the endless arguments about whether this is true are not the most fruitful way of understanding contemporary regional governance in the Southern Cone. On an empirical level, I argue that rather than being in a process of obsolescence, the Mercosur project is undergoing an important redefinition and that this is producing, with some parallels to the process underway in Asia, a rather different kind of regionalism from the ‘open regionalism’ model that prevailed in the 1990s. On a conceptual level, moreover, I suggest that understanding the nature of this redefinition demands a reorientation of some of the prevalent ways in which the study of regionalism is approached. Most especially, domestic political economy is usually taken as constitutive of regional political economy, and consequently regional political economy is depicted simply as an extension, or magnification, of domestic processes. The result is the reinforcement of a rather narrow focus on formal state-led regionalist projects, which obscures the social processes of regionalisation
that surround and overlap with them,3 and indeed which has been pivotal in producing what I consider to be rather misleading accounts of the imminent demise of the Mercosur. What is needed, I suggest, is an understanding of regional political economy as involving a set of dynamics that reach beyond formal regionalist, state-led processes, through which lens we can understand better the reconfiguration of regional governance in the Southern Cone.
