ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the challenges, limits and possibilities of achieving the long-standing but elusive goal of Inter-Americas economic regionalism through the constitution of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It focuses on the economic and political/ideological circumstances that promoted the emergence of the so-called "new regionalism" in Latin America and the Caribbean since the early 1980s. There are two primary underlying factors that may contribute to enable or delay the emergence of a wider and deeper economic integration in the Western Hemisphere: increased and complex "integration from below" and asymmetry. Given Brazil's leadership in Mercado Comun del Sur (MERCOSUR) and its emergence as a leading market force in Latin America, and the United States' dominant role both in North American Free trade Agreement (NAFTA) and in the Hemisphere as a whole, it is a truism to argue that there can be no FTAA without the consent of any of them.
