ABSTRACT
With the early flourishes of new regionalism in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, and the initial successes of new or revitalized integration projects, it was widely thought that regionalism had become entrenched as a structural force and a political commitment in the political economy of the region. While the various regional blocs on the whole did not feature the political ambition of European integration, the talk was of the emergence of a key strategy for achieving an enormous range of goals: participating effectively in the globalizing world economy, harnessing the benefits of globalization, mitigating the deleterious impact of globalization, enhancing the competitiveness of the region’s export sectors and products, providing a platform for collective negotiation and therefore achieving greater weight in international and multilateral bargaining processes, addressing the region’s profound social problems and, not least, countering the dominance of the United States in the region and other powerful actors in multilateral and international arenas.
