Description
The 2000s were marked by the rise of post-liberal and post-hegemonic regionalism in Latin America, a ‘transformative’ development in the history of regionalism in the region where social policy, propelled by the political left turn, economic growth due to the commodity price boom and previous decade of civil society agitation enabled the mounting of a robust challenge to neoliberalism and trade based understandings of integration.
Organisations like the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) attempted to redefine the purposes ang goals of regionalism and forwarded an intergovernmental, transwelfarist regional agenda promoting cooperation in health, education and infrastructure development. However, with the crisis of leadership, change in the political leadership and economic downturn the agenda has not only been rejected it stands debunked as of now.
Given the rigours of the pandemic and the particularly debilitating social, political and economic costs it has unleashed in the region this paper attempts to argue that the earlier binary of state versus market logic can no longer adequately explain the regional agenda of Latin America. Given the social agitations already underway in 2019 in several states but most importantly Chile, the fatigue of progressivism as an ideology and the incumbent need to develop regional cooperation mechanisms where multilateral institutions are increasingly insufficient, the future of regional social policy, especially on health along with diverse political agendas point to a more convoluted and complicated regionalism.
