Is South-South Co-operation still Possible? The Case of Brazil’s Strategy and Argentina’s Impulses

IN THE 70s, the countries of the South launched the idea of South-South cooperation to strengthen their capacity of negotiation with the North, through cooperative efforts aimed at solving issues of trade, development and the new international economic order. The success of the political bargaining that took place during the petrol price shock of 1973 served as a model of productive negotiation. However, the overall project of cooperation failed because of its loose nature and broad scope: the fallacy of the argument was its basic assumption that all underveloped countries had more commonalities that they really had, and that all solutions could be uniformly applied to each of them with equal success. In the 80s, the debt crisis might have offered a good opportunity for coordinated action. However, bilateral actions implemented by developed countries together with private creditors, in addition to the indebted countries ’ economic frailties, dissolved the attempts of multilateral cooperation; although, Latin American countries were still able to develop agreements regarding common policies for conflict resolution in the region. The debt crisis and the end of the Cold War in the late 80s hindered the Southern states ’ capacity for multilateral negotiation and bargaining power due to the East-West conflict. During the 90s, the effects of globalization exemplified that there were new winners and losers, but that almost none of the winners wer