Hemispheric integration and subregionalism in the Americas

Like current processes in the European Union, integration processes in the Americas are at present focused on a vision of 'enlargement'. As part of a broader process of hemispheric integration, the central project is to construct by 2005 a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) stretching 'from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego', as George Bush famously put it in his announcement in 1990 of the FTAA's forerunner, the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI). Like EU enlargement, but to a much greater extent, the FTAA project envisions deepened integration among economies of widely disparate sizes and levels of development; and in both regions this deepened integration is premised oil processes of market reform and democratization that have swept Latin America and eastern and central Europe over the past couple of decades. The FTAA, however, is distinct front the project of European enlargement in two crucial senses. First, the project of European enlargement entails incorporating new countries into the existing structures of the EU. The FTAA, by contrast, does not constitute an enlargement of a bloc or institutional structure already in existence. This is so despite the initial inclinations of the United States towards enlargement of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as the template for hemispheric integration, thereby constructing a 'hub-spoke' type of integration in which South American, Central American and Caribbean countries would be brought into its orbit through accession to NAFTA. The notion of NAFTA enlargement, however, was quickly vetoed, and it was agreed at the 1998 FTAA trade ministerial meetings in San Jose, Costa Rica, to permit 'bloc bargaining' as the format for subsequent negotiations. Second, and as a result of these developments, the FTAA is distinct from the EU ill that it seeks to build itself on, and thus integrate, existing subregional blocs. This latter characteristic also makes the FTAA unique among contemporary regionalist projects