Latin America’s new regional architecture : a cooperative or segmented regional governance complex?

In Latin America the repercussions of the proliferation and overlapping of regional organizations are discussed widely. This article examines the opposing views on this process. Some authors postulate that an exhaustion of integration in Latin America will end up in segmented regionalism and hemispheric disintegration. Others endorse a variable geometry of integration that facilitates intraregional cooperation and minimizes the risk of veto players and zero-sum politics. The article takes Latin America as a vantage point to analyse the topic of interacting and overlapping regional organizations from a more general perspective. It asks about the conditions under which the proliferation and overlapping of regional organizations might have positive or negative effects (on regional integration and cooperation). Additionally, it advocates broadening the analytical focus and replacing the analytical concepts of regional integration and cooperation with the analytical concept of regional governance. Regional governance more adequately captures and integrates different patterns of regional cooperation and different regional projects that result in overlapping regional organizations. Instead of looking at the proliferation of regional organizations from a perspective of fragmentation, this article contends that the focus should be redirected to analysing how different regional organizations interact. Regional interaction patterns can vary between synergistic, cooperative, conflictive, or segmented regional governance (complexes). In an initial application of this analytical scheme, the article summarizes the changing regional cooperation patterns in South America since 1990. In the conclusions it outlines some preliminary ideas for a future research agenda on regional governance (complexes)