ABSTRACT
Latin America has always been a region inclined to cultivating the ideal of cooperation or regional integration. The unionist or “great country” narrative has always been present in the Latin American political discourse. Entities such as the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA) and the Andean Pact and the Central American Common Market (CACM) were established in this stage. The economic nationalism that inspired them went hand in hand with the political goal of decreasing foreign dependence and encouraging a more autonomous development in Latin America. European academics or those educated in Europe tend to use the concept of regionalism that-together with that of integration-is dominant in the studies on the European Union. The general concept of multilateralism, for its part, also alludes to the existence of a collectivity of states, but membership in this group is not necessarily linked to a criterion of geographicalspatial location or of identity.
