Hegemony and Regional Governance in the Americas

Abstract

The 1990s witnessed a very significant expansion of regional institutions and important changes in the ambition, scope and density of regional governance in the Americas. These changes followed partly from the creation of regional economic integration schemes (as with NAFTA and Mercosur) and from the ongoing process of negotiation for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). All of these involve “deep integration” and the detailed international regulation of a wide range of previously domestic issues. In the political area, the 1990s saw a revitalization of the efforts of the Organization of American States (OAS) to establish democracy as a regional norm and to act collectively in the defense of democracy. The agendas of successive Summits of the Americas (Miami 1994, Santiago 1998, Quebec 2001) reveal an extraordinary range of issues, many of which — for example, corruption, money laundering and military relations — would have been very hard to imagine as legitimate topics for inter-American debate, let alone action, even a few years before. There was even a resurgence of security regionalism (for example, in the form of regular hemispheric defense Ministeriais) and increased international debate about the new security challenges facing the region (most notably in relation to drugs and transnational crime).