Description
By 2005, the Free Trade Area of the Americas was declared dead, the WTO Doha Round was at a standstill, and negotiations between MERCOSUR and the EU were suspended after an unsatisfactory exchange of offers. Brazil and Argentina were at the forefront of resistance to the EU and USA’s global trade liberalization agenda. Fast forward to 2019, the MERCOSUR-EU trade agreement is signed to much applause on both sides of the Atlantic – a win for inter-regionalism, MERCOSUR institutionalism, and the rules-based economic order amid the China-US trade war. What then does this agreement mean for counter-hegemonic resistance ‘from below’ in today’s global political economy, and how has resistance – both state and non-state – evolved over the intermediate period? Using primary and secondary sources, alongside 57 interviews with negotiators and activists across both regions, I conduct a process tracing analysis of the MERCOSUR-EU negotiations. On its surface, the agreement is one of the fairest of the EU’s recent negotiations with generous tariff reduction schedules for sensitive MERCOSUR industries and no TRIPS+ requirements for pharmaceutical patents. Nevertheless, the deal remains unratified, in part due to a 450-strong transregional civil society alliance. Ultimately a geopolitical deal, the final content of the agreement hides a complex web of resistance to trade liberalisation: between and within regions; between national leaders and civil servants; between the state and its citizens. By analysing these relationships, this paper contributes to academic and policy debates on the state of the liberal economic order and extant avenues for resistance and cooperation.
