Abstract
This chapter investigates the development of regionalism and interregionalism in Latin America as pertains to trade relations, one of the key drivers of regional integration in the region. The chapter develops the outlines of the thesis that Latin America or South America no longer provide the optimal geography for constituting an appropriate region. New ocean basin regions offer more promising regional and interregional trajectories to regroup Latin American countries than do their currently conceived land-based trade regions. By ‘re-mapping’ national figures for bilateral commercial trade the chapter provides initial quantitative evidence of new Latin American regional trade dynamics emerging within the continent’s two flanking ocean basin regions – the Pacific Basin and the Atlantic Basin – where new forms of non-hegemonic and maritime-centered regionalisms are being articulated and developed. The chapter concludes that new ‘ocean basin regionalisms’ offer alternative options for regional trade agreements and interregional trade integration which, while remaining complementary to the current sub-continental and continental regionalisms, could become a new guiding frame for Latin American regionalism.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Latin America’ has historically been used as a cultural category, originating from the European idea to set it apart from the Protestant, Anglophone former British colonies in the North and to tie them to European ‘Latin’ countries, mainly France (Panlatinism). However, with time the context and framing of its use have changed both in the ‘Latin American world’ and globally.
- 2.
Admittedly, to call South America a ‘continent’ – as we do here – is more in line with the way the English-speaking world tends to see, and to regionalize and label the world map. The ‘Latin’ or ‘Iberoamerican’ tendency, at least historically, would have been to view ‘South America’ as a ‘sub-continent’ of the ‘Americas.’ But whether it is labeled in anglo or latin terms, South America has served as an aspirational framing for either a regional integration goal or a ‘sub/continental stepping stone’ to an inclusive Americas regional association. Today, the world’s international organizations, like the UN or the Inter-American Development Bank designate Latin America and the Caribbean (or LAC) as a formal categorical region, including all of the non-Latin countries of the region.
- 3.
We refer to intra-regional trade as the commercial exchange of goods and services within states of the same ‘region’. Extra-regional trade is therefore trade with a state outside of a chosen region. Individual inter-regional trade flows are part of total extra-regional trade (Söderbaum and Van Langenhove, 2013).
- 4.
Apart from the continuing barriers represented by the Andes, the Amazon and the rest of the vast continental deep interior, analysts also point to the uniqueness of the South American hinterland which, along its Southern Atlantic counterpart in Africa, has never been as porous to global flows, or as accessible to governance, as have the Great Plains of North America, the northern-central plains of the European subcontinent, or even the great Heartland of Eurasia (Botafogo and Oliveira 2013).
- 5.
EU relations is of course is the prominent exception (see Ayuso and Gardini in this volume).
- 6.
One can make the case that other aspects of global economic activity, including investment balances and flows, corporate and supply-chain structures, and technological advances should also be considered key drivers of regionalisms and regional dynamics, but we do not treat these here, at least not directly, for reasons of space, time and resources. See Ayuso and Gardini in this volume for a discussion of waves of Latin American regional integration.
- 7.
Chile, Peru and Mexico have all signed the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), while Colombia announced interest in signing the TPP back in 2010.
- 8.
The future of the TPP has been clouded with uncertainty since Donald Trump, President of the US, signed an executive order on January 23, 2017 which withdrew the US from the trade agreement. Nevertheless, it remains more than possible that a transpacific trade agreement will come into being, sooner or later. It could be a TPP which initially does not involve the US. China could also sign the TPP – possibly provoking a future US administration to return to it as well – or it could take advantage of the moment to consolidate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a pan-Asian regional trade agreement which is not as deep or as wide-embracing as the TPP and does not include any transpacific partners from the Americas. The TPP includes: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States (until January 23, 2017) and Vietnam. The RCEP includes: the ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam) and the six states with which ASEAN has existing free trade agreements (Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand).
- 9.
Non-hegemonic in that a Pacific Basin with both the US and China, along with developing and emerging countries would offset any hegemonic pattern. See “Pacific Alliance Trade Bloc Eyes Global Role,” Strategic Comments, February 2014, 20(2), pp. ix–x.
- 10.
UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, is one such continental project. Signed in 2008, the agreement intends to unite the already consolidated agreements of Mercosur and the Andean Community into one agreement that features the rules of the regional trade accords of both, within a Mercosur-style overarching political structure for common policies, including regional security issues and a regional development bank. The key to the UNASUR project is overlapping membership by Bolivia and Venezuela. Mexico and Panama serve as outside observers.
- 11.
Mexico is included in the North American region, as its main source of imports and market for exports remains the US, both through NAFTA.
- 12.
See Marcia Stanton, “The Worth of the Deep Blue,” Namib Times , April 27, 2013 (http://www.namibtimes.net/forum/topics/the-worth-of-the-deep-blue), and Global Ocean Commission, “Petitioning Ban Ki-moon: Help secure a living ocean, food and prosperity – propose a new agreement for high seas protection” September 2014. (https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/ban-ki-moon-help-secure-a-living-ocean-food-and-prosperity-propose-a-new-agreement-for-high-seas-protection-in-september-2014).
- 13.
According to Pitta e Cunha (2014), a World Bank study undertaken in 2008 estimated that the total annual value of all marine ecosystem services, globally, and for which there already existed a market, was US$20 trillion, equivalent to about 33% of a nominal Global GDP at the time of around US$60 trillion.
- 14.
The Arctic Basin is one of the inevitable ‘blind spots’ of this version of the ocean basin projection. However, we have only ignored the Arctic Basin because of very limiting data and methodological constraints. In particular, to build our regional mapping model of global flows to include the Arctic as the ‘fourth basin’ would require a category for ‘tri-basin countries,’ and much more complex structures and coding within the model. Given these short-term limitations, together with the fact that the Arctic has not yet truly opened to global flows, it has been sacrificed in this initial version of the projection.
- 15.
While we believe that this new conceptualization is a more valid and universal construction, we also acknowledge that we are only advocating substituting one paradigm for another.
- 16.
Both states’ opposition to the FTAA is a notable exception.
- 17.
See footnote 8, above.
- 18.
See footnote 8, above.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Frank Mattheis and John McCormack for extensive comments on earlier drafts, and Elsy Gonzalez and Jair Cabrera for research assistance. All errors remain our own.
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ANNEX: Data and Methods
ANNEX: Data and Methods
9.1.1 The Alternative Regional Mapping Model (ARM)
To produce an ‘ocean basin projection’ of the global geopolitical and geo-economic flow map requires a ‘re-cutting’ of the current data to account for a number of geographical realities of the world’s ocean basins.
To generate such an ‘ocean basin projection’ of the data, we have constructed an ‘alternative regional data mapping model’ (ARM). Even though the issue at hand is Latin American trade regionalism, in order to capture ocean basin regional dynamics we map beyond the geographical relief of the ‘continental’ landmasses of the ‘Western Hemisphere’. We acknowledge the distortions that might arise in this projection if it were to neglect a proper treatment of the ‘dual basin’ issue
The ARM model is used to compare the relative regional trade connectedness of a number of representative Latin American countries since 2000, when the full emergence of China into the global trade arena became clear in the wake of its WTO accession at the peak of the post-Cold War globalization era.
9.1.1.1 Data and Indicators
The basic data used as inputs into the model are national (ie, country level) ‘bilateral’ trade figures (ie, total merchandise trade: export plus imports) over the period 2000–2013. This annual bilateral trade data comes from the UNCOMTRADE database. Because UNCOMTRADE’s coverage includes all of the world’s annual bilateral international trade at the country level, it captures nearly all of world trade each year in a way which allows for national level analysis. Following the appropriate conceptualization and coding, the national figures are aggregated and subsequently ‘mapped’ from (or in relation to) any scale or perspective (ie. sub-regional, regional, continental, basin, global etc). To test the proposed hypothesis, this annual trade data is compared to chosen the relative intensities of regional and inter-regional connections and dynamics from both the country and the continental/basin regional perspectives.
The first key indicator is the share of a country’s total international trade which is considered to be ‘intra-regional’ – that is, trade with another country that is considered to belong to the same ‘region.’ This indicator represents the relative intensity of a country’s international trade interdependence (or intraregional trade ‘connectedness’) within a defined region. This indicator is formulated by dividing the level of a country’s intraregional trade by the level of its total global trade. What is not ‘intra-regional’ trade (in relation to any defined region) is considered to be ‘extra-regional’ trade with the rest of the world – that is, trade with countries outside the defined region. ‘Inter-regional’ trade – a sub-set of ‘extra-regional’ trade – is considered to be trade outside the defined region with another defined region.
The second key indicator is the contribution of ‘intra-regional’ trade to the growth of a country’s (or a continental/ocean basin-region’s) total trade over the period 2000–2013. This indicator is formulated by dividing the total growth in intraregional trade (in absolute terms, over the period 2000–13) by the total growth in a country’s total global trade, over the same period. This indicator represents an absolute deepening (or erosion) of a country’s ‘intra-regional’ connectedness with any ‘region’ to which it belongs, or might belong, reveals the particular region with which a country has recently most deepened (or weakened) its interdependences.
9.1.2 Basin Definitions
In this section we delineate which countries of the world belong to which ocean basin regions used in the data projections, including our identification of dual and tri-basin countries.
9.1.2.1 The Atlantic Basin (AB):
North America
Canada (tri-P-A), US (tri-P-A), Mexico (dual-P)
Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
Mexico (dual-P), Bermuda, Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, THE REST OF THE Caribbean countries, Belize, Guatemala (DUAL-P), Colombia (dual-P), Nicaragua (dual-P), Honduras (dual-P), Costa Rica (dual-P), Panama (dual-P), Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, French Guiana, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina
Africa
South Africa (dual-IO), Lesotho (dual-IO), Namibia, Angola, Botswana (dual-IO), Zaire, Congo, Gabon, Chad, Sudan (dual-IO), Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Central African Republican, Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Cape Verde, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt (dual-IO), Zambia (dual-IO), Zimbabwe (dual-IO)
EU and the remaining Mediterranean
Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Malta, UK, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Luxemburg, Denmark (dual-A, including Greenland), Sweden (dual-A), Finland (dual-A), Slovenia, Andorra, Croatia, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Cyrus, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Norway (dual-A), Switzerland, Iceland (dual-A), Turkey (dual-GC), Israel (dual-IO), Lebanon (dual-IO)
9.1.2.2 The Pacific Basin (P):
Canada (tri-AB-A), United States (tri-AB-A), Mexico (dual-AB), San Salvador, Costa Rica (dual-AB), Panama (dual-AB), Colombia (dual-AB), Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Russia (tri-GC-A), China, Japan, Australia (dual-IO), New Zealand, South Korea, North Korea, Philippines, Indonesia (dual-IO), Vietnam, Thailand (dual-IO), Malaysia (dual-IO), Singapore (dual-IO), Laos, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea, New Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Federated States of Micronesia, Salomon Islands
9.1.2.3 The Indian Ocean Basin (IO):
Israel (dual-AB), Lebanon (dual-AB),Singapore (dual-P), Indonesia (dual-IO), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, India, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Thailand (dual-P), Malaysia (dual-P), Australia (dual-P), Saudi Arabia (dual-GC), Iran (dual-GC), Iraq (dual-GC), Kuwait (dual-GC), Mozambique, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, South Africa (dual-AB), Lesotho (dual-AB), Botswana (dual-AB), Sudan (dual-AB), Egypt (dual-AB), Zambia (dual-AB), Zimbabwe (dual-AB) Bahrain (dual-GC), Qatar (dual-GC), United Arab Emirates (dual-GC), Oman, Yemen
9.1.2.4 The Arctic Basin (A):
Canada (tri-AB-P), United States (tri-AB-P), Russia (tri-P-GC), Denmark (dual-AB, including Greenland), Iceland (dual-AB), Norway (dual-AB), Sweden (dual-AB), Finland (dual-AB)
9.1.2.5 The Great Crescent (GC):
Moldova (dual-AB), Ukraine (dual-AB), Belarus (dual-AB), Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Saudi Arabia (dual-IO), Iran (dual-IO), Iraq (dual-IO), Kuwait (dual-IO), Russia (tri-P-A), Afghanistan, Bahrain (dual-IO), Qatar (dual-IO), United Arab Emirates (dual-IO)
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Isbell, P., García, K.N. (2018). Latin America’s Interregional Reconfiguration: The Beginning or the End of Latin America’s Continental Integration?. In: Mattheis, F., Litsegård, A. (eds) Interregionalism across the Atlantic Space. United Nations University Series on Regionalism, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62908-7_9
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