ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how Venezuela has influenced the problematic trends that have characterised South American regionalism in recent years. In a review of the pertinent literature, it adopts a distinction between Venezuela as agency and conduit. Although there is ample evidence that both Venezuelan actors and the multidimensionality and internationalisation of the country’s ongoing crisis have left their mark on South American governance and region-building, the analysis makes an even more profound claim about Venezuelan influence. Venezuelan factors have contributed to a bold experiment to create a South American regional order that went terribly wrong and has left the region and the Americas more broadly with an ongoing situation of dual disorder or hemispheric order upheaval. Until South America’s and the Western Hemisphere’s fundamental problems of order are addressed, it will be difficult to get South American cooperation back on track.
