"Latin America and the EC: Closing Gaps in Cooperation?"

Montecinos, Veronica. (1991) "Latin America and the EC: Closing Gaps in Cooperation?". In: UNSPECIFIED, Fairfax, Virginia. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the Introduction]. The boundaries between diplomacy and economic policy are being redefined as a result of the growing interdependency in the international political economy. Those boundaries have also been altered by the recent encompassing swing to democracy in regions affected by internal and external economic crises. Policy elites are attempting to coordinate macroeconomic and foreign policy within and between regions and subregions, as a way of enhancing their capabilities for carrying out economic and political restructuring. The search for greater policy effectiveness and stronger democracies has rendered necessary to introduce institutional reforms in decision making structures, at the national as well as at the supranational level. In spite of recent developments, the institutional frameworks for international cooperation are still quite tentative. At a normative level, the incipient attention to principles of international distributive justice may be taken as an indication. Some think that to the extent that citizens of rich countries have obligations towards the welfare of people in other countries, a new basis for international morality appears to be necessary. "The state-centered image of the world has lost its normative relevance because of the rise of global economic interdependence" (Beitz 1988:48). How can basic rights in all countries be institutionalized and protected? Some argue for the desirability of a constitutional world democracy and an elected world government (Nielsen 1988:270-271). But experience shows that attempts to institute almost any form of supranational authority have confronted the unwillingness of national actors to subordinate their particular interests to collective goals. The European and the Latin American experiences indicate that the speed at which integration schemes have progressed--and their scope--have been seriously constrained by the resistance to transfer sovereign powers away from the domestic spheres of decision making. The conviction that flaws in the progress towards regional unity were in part due to the architecture of integration has recently led to treaty amendments, adjustments in interinstitutional relations and a series of other institutional innovations.

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