Description
There is no dearth of cases to be evaluated when comparisons of regionalisms in South Asia and Latin America are conceptualized. However, while the overarching flagship regional organisation of South Asia, namely the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has often suffered severe stalemates due to regional tensions, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations, has presented itself on the opposite spectrum of
active, if at times ineffectual, declaratory regionalism. Where regional integration in Latin America is both policy and project (Tussie 2009), in South Asia, regional rivalries, international interference and fraught identity driven nationalisms have precluded discussions of cohesion, even in the face of conjoined histories. The presence of rival regional powers, starkly in the case of South Asia and more obliquely in Latin America has enabled interesting solidarity patterns to emerge in the regional formations. Yet, SAARC and CELAC both continue to exist, both are evoked in times of crisis and both continue to represent different versions of regional solidarities that are enunciated variously by these regional rivals where different trajectories of development and different political ideologies have acted as intervening variables.
What are the ways in which the region was utilized by these countries to forge domestic policies of legitimacy? In what ways did their individual behavior stack against the existence of these two all-encompassing regional organisations? What are the hopes for regional solidarity post-pandemic in South Asia and Latin America?
