Abstract
In December 1994, representatives of thirty-four states in the Americas1 gathered in Miami for the First Summit of the Americas. On the occasion they announced their commitment to work toward the formation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). For the first time in the history of inter-American relations, the ideal of economic cooperation was grounded in a reality that signaled hemispheric convergence toward market economy and electoral democracy. By late 2003, when the FTAA negotiations stagnated, that convergence was not as clear. Almost a decade after the launching of the FTAA idea, the negotiation process was paralyzed and was followed by fragmented trade agreements that defied the initial attempt of hemisphere-wide cooperation.
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Notes
For an exception, see Justin Robertson and Maurice A. East, eds., Diplomacy and Developing Nations. Post-Cold War Foreign Policy-Making Structures and Processes (Abington: Taylor & Francis; New York: Routledge, 2005), which introduces analytical categories of foreign policymaking and their application to a broad range of countries, including China, Brazil, Ghana, and Malaysia.
For earlier studies on the experience of developing states, see Alberto van Klaveren, “The Analysis of Latin American Foreign Policies. Theoretical Perspectives,” in Latin American Nations in World Politics, ed. Heraldo Muñoz and Joseph S. Tulchin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 1–21.
Jeane A.K. Hey, “Foreign Policy in Dependent States,” in Foreign Policy Analysis. Continuity and Change in its Second Generation, ed. Laura Neack, Jeanne A.K. Hey, and Patrick J. Haney (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 201–213.
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John H. Barton et al., The Evolution of the Trade Regime. Politics, Law and Economics of the GATT and the WTO (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2.
John G. Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36.2 (Spring 1982), 379–415.
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Open Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago, Chile: United Nations, 1994).
C. Fred Bergsten, “Open Regionalism,” Working Paper 97–3, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC, 1997, http://www.petersoninstitute.org/publications/wp/wp.cfm?Research ID=152
For the link between autonomous trade reforms and cooperation in the new regionalism, see Stephan Haggard, “The Political Economy of Regionalism in Asia and the Americas,” in The Political Economy of Regionalism, ed. Edward D. Mansfield and Helen V. Milner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 20–48.
For a comparison of the experiences in the two regions, see Ramiro Pizarro, Comparative Analysis of Regionalism in Latin America and Asia-Pacific. CEPAL Serie Comercio Internacional No. 6 (Santiago, Chile: United Nations, 1999), http://www.eclac.cl/publicaciones/xml/5/4285/lcl1307i.pdf
Services, for instance, were only added to the scope of the multilateral trading system in the Uruguay Round. On the pressures by OECD countries to include services as part of the trade concept, see William J. Drake and Kalypso Nicolaidis, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutionalization: Trade in Services and the Uruguay Round,” International Organization 46.1 (Winter 1992), 37–100.
Economist Robert Z. Lawrence suggests that developing countries may benefit from “‘importing’ new institutions and regulatory systems” that “have been pretested in the international arena and are compatible with its norms,” in Regionalism, Multilateralism, and Deeper Integration (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1996), 17. See also “Conclusions,” in Gary Sampson and Stephen Woolcock, eds., Regionalism, Multilateralism, and Economic Integration: The Recent Experience (New York: United Nations University Press, 2003), 336–339. A more critical perspective, highlighting the risk of rising constraints on national policies, is offered by Robert M. Hamwey in “Expanding National Policy Space for Development: Why the Multilateral Trading System Must Change,” Working Paper 25, South Centre, September 2005, http://www.southcentre.org/publications/work-ingpapers/wp25.pdf
The literature on the issue is vast. For a critical view of the phenomenon, see Jagdish Bhagwati, The World Trading System at Risk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Jagdish Bhagwati and Arving Panagaryia, eds., Free Trade Areas or Free Trade? The Economics of Preferential Trade Arrangements (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1995).
Jaime de Mello and Arvind Panagaryia, eds., New Dimension in Regional Integration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For the WTO’s perspective, see Regionalism and the World Trading System (Geneva: World Trade Organization, 1995).
The concept of regionalism is contested and some scholars prefer to use the term in the plural in order to capture the diversity of responses coming from states, firms and civil society. See Morten Bøås, Marianne H. Marchand, and Timothy M. Shaw, “The Weave-World: The Regional Interweaving of Economies, Ideas and Identities,” in Theories of New Regionalism. A Palgrave Reader, ed. Fredrik Söderbaum and Timothy M. Shaw (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 197–210.
Alan L. Winters, “Regionalism vs. Multilateralism,” in Market Integration, Regionalism and the Global Economy, ed. Richard Baldwin et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8–10.
Regionalization can be described as a localized manifestation of globalization. Although states matter, neither of these processes necessarily relies on a state decision in order to continue. For conceptual reviews of the terms globalization/regionalization and globalism/regionalism, see Michael Schultz, Fredrik Söderbaum, and Joakim Öjendal, “Key Issues in the New Regionalism: Comparisons from Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” in Comparing Regionalisms: Implications for Global Development, ed. Björn Hettne, Andras Inotai, and Osvaldo Sunkel (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave, 2001), 234–276.
Andrew Gamble, “Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism,” in European Union and New Regionalism: Regional Actors and Global Governance in a Post-hegemonic Era, ed. Mario Telò (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 21–37.
For a definition of regionalization that places it closer to the idea of regional integration, see Alex Warleigh-Lack, “Toward a Conceptual Framework of Regionalisation: Bridging ‘New Regionalism’ and ‘Integration Theory’,” Review of International Political Economy 13.5 (December 2006), 750–771.
For instance, Japanese firms involved in integrated production and investment with other countries have pressured the Japanese government to move toward bilateral trade agreements when the lack of such agreements could lead to a loss of competitiveness for those firms. In Mark S. Manger, “Competition and Bilateralism in Trade Policy: The Case of Japan’s Free Trade Agreements,” Review of International Political Economy 15.5 (December 2005), 804–828.
Dilip K. Das, Regionalism in Global Trade (Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004), 25–56; Brigid Gavin, and Luk Van Langenhove, “Trade in a World of Regions,” in Sampson and Woolcock, Regionalism, Multilateralism, and Economic Integration, 284.
Stefan Schirm, Globalization and the New Regionalism. Global Markets, Domestic Politics and Regional Cooperation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 13–14.
For recent studies on the new regionalism in Asia, see Charles Harvie, Fukunari Kimuar, and Hyun-Hoon Lee, eds., New East Asian Regionalism. Causes, Progress and Country Perspectives (Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005), particularly the Introduction.
Fu-Kuo Liu and Philippe Régnier, eds., Regionalism in East Asia: Paradigm Shifting? (London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003).
Shaun Narine, Explaining ASEAN: Regionalism in the Southeast Asia (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002).
For studies including the Pacific, see Jenny Bryant-Tokalau and Ian Frazer, eds., Redefining the Pacific?: Regionalism. Past, Present and Future (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).
Nick Bisley, “East Asia’s Changing Regional Architecture: Toward an East Asian Economic Community,” Pacific Affairs 80.4 (2007), 603–625.
A recent evaluation of APEC challenges is offered by Lorraine Elliot et al., APEC and the Search for Relevance: 2007 and Beyond (Canberra: The Australian National University/RSPAS, 2006), http://rspas.anu.edu.au/ir/pubs/keynote s/documents/Keynotes-7.pdf.
On the new regionalism at APEC, see Ross Garnaut, Open Regionalism and Trade Liberalization. An Asia-Pacific Contribution to the World Trade System (Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 1.
Garnaut offers an economic critique of the agreement in “Australian Security and Free Trade with America,” in Balancing Act: Law, Policy and Politics in Globalisation and Global Trade, ed. Jianfu Chen and Gordon Walker (Leichhardt, N.S.W.: The Federation Press, 2004), 53–74.
For a detailed analysis of the political economy of the negotiations, see Ann Capling, All the Way with the USA: Australia, the US and Free Trade (Sydney: University of NSW, 2005).
Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millenium: Journal of International Studies 10. 2 (1981), 126–155.
Regions are understood not only in geographic terms, but as a “social and cognitive construct,” grounded in “political processes.” See Peter Katzenstein, “Regionalism and Asia,” in New Regionalisms in the Global Political Economy, ed. Shaun Breslin et al. (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 105.
Takashi Terada, “Constructing an “East Asian” Concept and Growing Regional Identity: from EAEC to ASEAN+3,” The Pacific Review 16.2 (2003), 251–277.
John MacLean, “Toward a Political Economy of Agency in Contemporary International Relations,” in Politics and Globalisation. Knowledge, Ethics and Agency, ed. Martin Shaw (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 180–181.
Björn Hettne, “Beyond the “New” Regionalism,” in Key Debates n New Political Economy, ed. Anthony Payne (London: Routledge, 2006), 137.
Hegemony is used here to refer to both the material and ideological components of dominance. See Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci: Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay on Method,” Millenium: Journal of International Studies 12.2 (1983), 162–175.
An exception is Jean Grugel and Wil Hout, “Regions, Regionalism and the South,” in Regionalism across the North-South Divide: State Strategies and Globalization, ed. Jean Grugel and Wil Hout (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 3–13. They explicitly reject the idea that developing countries are completely deprived of the means to design economic and political strategies. For the variations among states in the construction of regionalism in East Asia, see Liu and Régnier, Regionalism in East Asia.
Wil Hout, “Theories of International Relations and the New Regionalism,” in Grugel and Hout, Regionalism across the North-South, 14–28. A similar criticism is offered by Nicola Phillips, “Whither IPE?,” in her edited volume, Globalizing International Political Economy (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 246–269.
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© 2011 Zuleika Arashiro
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Arashiro, Z. (2011). Introduction. In: Negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119055_1
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