ABSTRACT
North America suffers from an existential dilemma. Students of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the process of North American integration have had trouble classifying this area, or even deciding whether it is really a region. North America, with its dominant superpower hegemon, its weak regional institutions, and its straddling of the North/South divide (it brings together two highly developed states, Canada and the United States, with Mexico, a middle-income developing state), does not seem to fit easily into existing categories and frameworks for studying regionalism. While it is a region primarily of the ‘North’, the theoretical frameworks that have been developed to study the main example of Northern regionalism, the European Union (EU), are ill suited to accounting for the origins, nature, and prospects of regionalism in North America. Not just scholars, but also state-based practitioners of economic integration in North America, have widely rejected the EU as a relevant model or point of comparison.
