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.
The context of the pandemic only served to exacerbate the need for neighbourly support systems in an increasingly introverted international system which had been marked by rising protectionism and hypernationalism. This paper attempts to understand how these regional solidarity projects fared by evaluating the pandemic regional policies of two regional powers in the regions, namely India and Brazil in the regional institutions of SAARC and CELAC. Both countries have made claims for not just regional leadership but also leadership at the international stage. Both, have had these claims contested by other regional powers in their respective regions. Both have been governed by increasingly nationalist regimes and both countries have suffered gravely under the pandemic. However, while the Modi-government in India has eked out its own internationalist path towards supporting multilateralism, the Bolsonaro government in its policy of negation of the pandemic, has increasingly introverted itself from the region. 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?
This paper aims to unearth nuances of pandemic behaviour of these two regional giants by firstly, evaluating the histories of regional solidarity in South Asia and Latin America. Secondly, it hopes to situate regional cooperation projects in both regions in context through an evaluation of SAARC and CELAC. Finally, it hopes to disentangle the vagaries of pandemic support and containment policies by these two regional giants with their regional partners.
