Spurred Emulation: The EU and Regional Integration in Mercosur and SADC

Abstract

This article analyses the EU's influence on regional institutional change in Mercosur and the Southern African Development Community from a diffusion perspective. Focusing on market-building objectives and dispute settlement mechanisms, it addresses the puzzle that policy-makers in both regions have, over time, increasingly adopted EU-style institutional arrangements even though alternative institutional models more suitable to their preferences for ‘pragmatic’, sovereignty-preserving cooperation have been available at various critical junctures of institutional evolution. The article makes two main arguments. First, it suggests that EU influence has affected outcomes in several specific ways that are irreducible to, and quite different from, mainstream functional accounts of economic regionalism. Second, it contends that the diffusion of EU institutional templates can be understood as a process of spurred emulation, when regional policy-makers emulate EU institutional models under conditions of uncertainty and promoted by EU-oriented domestic actors as well as the EU's direct involvement in the process.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Karen Alter, Tanja Börzel, Liesbet Hooghe, Ulrike Lorenz, Gary Marks, Thomas Risse, Osvaldo Saldías, Ingeborg Tömmel, two anonymous reviewers as well as participants at the Berlin Conference on Comparative Regionalism for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Moreover, financial support by the Research College ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’, Free University of Berlin, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. The discussion of the Mercosur Court of Justice is still somewhat speculative, as the court's establishment has only been agreed ‘in principle’, but no concrete steps have been taken in this direction.

2. However, these scope conditions lead to indeterminate expectations regarding the likelihood of diffusion from the EU across the two cases as they cut in opposite directions. We would expect weaker state capacity and a higher democratic quality of regimes to be associated with a higher likelihood because the activities of (non-governmental) ‘spurring’ agents are more likely to resonate. While state capacity is weaker, on average, in SADC than in Mercosur, the democratic quality is, on average, higher in the latter.

3. Both models were also deemed compatible with the pan-African ambition to form an African Economic Community (see SADCC Council of Ministers, 22–23 August 1991: 33–5).

4. SADC records at the time mention no single study conducted to weigh the costs and benefits of the two potential options.

5. See http://www.sadc.int/tribunal/organisation.php (accessed 14 June 2011).

6. However, in the area of human rights a 2008 Tribunal ruling on Zimbabwean President Mugabe's land reform (Campbell case) has sparked huge controversy and triggered a debate about curtailing the Tribunal's mandate; see http://www.zimbabwedemocracynow.com/2011/05/26/sadc-tribunal-rights-watch-statement/ (accessed 14 June 2011).