ABSTRACT

Latin American countries have been in the centre of the two waves of regionalism of the twentieth century, as Richard Pomfret (2001) has signalized. During the two periods of rising regionalism (the 1960s and the 1990s), these countries engaged several sub-regional integration schemes, with different characteristics and dimensions. The second regionalism cycle in Latin America (LA) was not only much more “liberal” than the integration cycle of the 1960s but it differed in several other aspects (like deepness, sectoral coverture, integration of new themes and, last but not least, involving countries with different degrees of economic development).