The Pacific Alliance: regional integration as neoliberal discipline

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the Pacific Alliance constitutes a multilevel state project to lock-in neoliberal reforms in each member country. Using a strategic relational approach to institutions that emphasizes the interconnection between institutional and social dynamics, it demonstrates that the AP is a state project that is both a regional market access strategy and a domestic disciplinary mechanism. Notably, it represents an attempt to reinforce the neoliberal economic export models that predominate in each member country: Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. Buttressed by dominant domestic and transnational social forces in each country, technocrats in each member countries seek to reproduce institutional strategies of depoliticization that were successfully employed in their countries at a regional level in the AP in view of growing political instability and discontentment with neoliberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Regionalism
• neoliberalism
• technocracy
• Pacific Alliance
• depoliticization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to David Collier technocrats can be defined as ‘individuals with a high level of specialized academic training which serves as a principal criterion on the basis of which they are selected to occupy key decision-making or advisory roles in large, complex organizations—both public and private’ (1979, p. 403). Technocrats in Latin America are also characterized by their education in particular elite universities domestically and overseas in the United States and the United Kingdom where they were imbued with a neoliberal outlook on the role of the state and the economy (Silva, 1996, p. 315).

2 The Washington Consensus can be defined by as a suite of policies developed by the Bretton Woods institutions located in Washington during the 1980s that promulgated economic liberalization in a bid to dismantle the welfare states that had been established during the postwar era. An important component of the Washington Consensus was to promote trade agreements, including regional ones, that would facilitate commercial exchange and insertion in the global economy (Ovando Aldana et al., 2017, p. 172).

3 Carlos Alberto Chaves García (2017), conversely, has noted that it is quite similar to Asian forms of regional cooperation and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, specifically. He argues that what differentiates the AP from the integration projects associated with Open Regionalism is its emphasis on technical cooperation as well as on a structure based on ministerial meetings, technical working groups, and presidential summits (Chaves Garcia, 2017, p. 30). Characteristics, incidentally, that were also employed during the FTAA negotiations

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Marcel Nelson

Marcel Nelson teaches politics at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada. His research interests include regionalism and the left in Latin America. His publications include A history of the FTAA: From hegemony to fragmentation in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Walking the 'Tightrope' of socialist governance in Steve Ellner (Ed.), Latin America's pink tide: Breakthroughs and shortcomings (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).