Regionalism in the Americas and Africa

Regionalism in most of the world is a story about markets — tariffs removed, factors of production freed, rules harmonised. In the Americas and in Africa it is first a story about sovereignty. Latin American and Caribbean states built regional institutions in the shadow of a single overwhelming neighbour; African states built them out of the wreckage of a partition drawn in Berlin. Both regions have produced unusually dense institutional landscapes and unusually shallow integration, and the reasons for the gap are different in each case.

The sovereignty problem as the organising fact

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• Regionalism in these two regions is defensive before it is commercial. The European project began by pooling coal and steel between equals; the inter-American and African projects began with the question of how weak states survive a strong one, or a strong outside world.
• The asymmetry is of two different kinds, and this drives everything that follows.
  • In the Americas the asymmetry is internal. The United States is a member of the regional organisation it dominates. Institutional design therefore becomes a contest over whether the organisation constrains Washington or legitimises it.
  • In Africa the asymmetry is external and historical. Colonial powers left the continent partitioned into fifty-odd units whose borders cut across nations and whose economies were wired to Europe rather than to each other. Regionalism there is an attempt to undo an inherited geography.
• Both regions display high regionalism and low regionalisation — dense treaties, secretariats and summits sitting on thin flows of trade, investment and people. This is the mirror image of East Asia.
  • The diagnosis differs in each: Latin American blocs are undercut by ideological volatility, African blocs by competing primary-commodity structures and missing infrastructure.
• Neither region has climbed far up the integration ladder. Mercosur is an incomplete customs union, the Andean Community a partial one, CARICOM a single market with a long implementation backlog, the AfCFTA a free trade area in its opening phase — and the ceiling has been political in every case.

Where Europe pooled sovereignty because it had too much history, the Americas and Africa guarded it because they had too little power.

The inter-American system: from Monroe to Bogotá

The doctrine that framed a hemisphere

• The Monroe Doctrine (1823) declared the Americas closed to further European colonisation and pledged US non-interference in European affairs in return. It was a unilateral statement of policy, not a treaty, and for decades Britain’s navy did the actual enforcing.
• The Roosevelt Corollary (1904) inverted it. Theodore Roosevelt asserted a US right to exercise “international police power” in cases of “chronic wrongdoing” by Latin American states — converting a shield against Europe into a licence for intervention. The corollary underwrote occupations of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

Two founding visions: Bolívar and Pan-Americanism

• Simón Bolívar’s Congress of Panama (1826) is the older and defeated vision — a confederation of the newly independent Spanish American republics, with a common army, a mutual-defence pact and a permanent assembly, explicitly excluding the United States from the core arrangement.
  • Only four states ratified anything; the treaty of union was ratified by Gran Colombia alone. The project collapsed with Gran Colombia itself.
  • Bolivarianism survived as an idea rather than an institution and returns repeatedly — in ALBA, in UNASUR, in CELAC — as the argument that Latin American unity must be built without Washington.
• Pan-Americanism is the rival tradition, and it was made in Washington. The First International Conference of American States (Washington, 1889–90), convened by US Secretary of State James G. Blaine, created the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, renamed the Pan American Union in 1910.
  • Its agenda was commercial reciprocity and arbitration; its secretariat sat in Washington and its governing board was chaired ex officio by the US Secretary of State.
  • Latin American delegations used these conferences to press the doctrine of non-intervention, most successfully at Montevideo in 1933, where the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States affirmed that no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.
• The Good Neighbor policy under Franklin Roosevelt accepted that formulation, renounced the Roosevelt Corollary in principle, withdrew the marines from Haiti and Nicaragua and abrogated the Platt Amendment. It bought hemispheric solidarity through the Second World War and set the terms on which the post-war system was built.

The Rio Treaty and the Charter of Bogotá

• The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR, the Rio Treaty, 1947) is the hemispheric collective-defence pact: an armed attack on one American state is to be considered an attack on all, with the Organ of Consultation empowered to decide collective measures by a two-thirds vote.
  • It preceded NATO and served as its template, but its Cold War use was overwhelmingly against internal communism rather than external attack.
  • Its credibility broke in the Falklands/Malvinas War (1982), when the United States backed Britain against a fellow Rio Treaty signatory. Mexico denounced the treaty in 2002; Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua followed.
• The Charter of the Organization of American States was signed at Bogotá on 30 April 1948 and entered into force in December 1951, absorbing the Pan American Union as its General Secretariat. The same conference produced the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, adopted months before the Universal Declaration.
• Article 1 of the Charter states that the OAS has no powers other than those expressly conferred, and the non-intervention articles were written by Latin American states as a legal fence around the Good Neighbor promise.
• The Charter has been amended four times — Buenos Aires (1967), Cartagena de Indias (1985), Washington (1992) and Managua (1993) — adding development, democracy and the power to suspend a member whose government is overthrown by force.

The four pillars and the organs

• The General Assembly is the supreme organ, meeting annually, one state one vote. The Permanent Council, sitting continuously in Washington with ambassadors of every member, is where the political crises are actually handled. The General Secretariat is headed by a Secretary General elected for a five-year term.
• The Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs is convened for urgent problems; it is the organ that suspended Cuba in 1962 and that has repeatedly been the venue for hemispheric crisis diplomacy.
• The IACHR is the part of the system with genuine independent force. It receives individual petitions, conducts country visits, issues precautionary measures and refers cases to the Court — and it has done so against governments of every ideological stripe, including in cases the United States would rather not have seen brought.

The democracy machinery

• Resolution 1080 and the Santiago Commitment (1991) created an automatic procedure: on any sudden interruption of the democratic institutional process in a member state, the Secretary General must convene the Permanent Council within ten days.
• It was first used on Peru in 1992, after Alberto Fujimori‘s autogolpe dissolved Congress and suspended the constitution.
  • OAS pressure produced a negotiated return to constitutional forms — a constituent assembly and fresh elections — rather than restoration of the status quo. It is read both as the system’s first success and as the measure of how modest its successes are.
• The Washington Protocol (1992) added Article 9 to the Charter, allowing suspension of a member whose democratically constituted government is overthrown by force.
• The Inter-American Democratic Charter was adopted at Lima on 11 September 2001. Its Article 1 declares that the peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments an obligation to promote and defend it — an unusually strong statement of an entitlement running to peoples rather than states.
  • Article 20 allows any member state or the Secretary General to request that the Permanent Council take up an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime.
  • Article 21 provides for suspension by a two-thirds vote of a special session of the General Assembly, with readmission requiring the same majority.
  • Honduras was suspended under Article 21 in July 2009 after the removal of President Manuel Zelaya — the only use of the provision to date — and readmitted in June 2011 following the Cartagena Accord.
• The Charter’s weakness is that it is written for coups and not for erosion. It captures the tank in the presidential palace far better than the incremental capture of courts, electoral authorities and media, which is how democratic decline in the region has mostly proceeded since.

The United States in the OAS: instrument, forum, or both

The place of the United States is not one feature of the OAS among others; it is the organising fact of the institution. The Organization was designed by Latin American jurists to bind the hemisphere’s strongest state in law, and by Washington to give hemispheric legitimacy to policies it intended to pursue anyway. Both purposes are written into the same Charter, and the history of the OAS is the record of which purpose prevailed in a given decade.

The case that the OAS has been an instrument of US policy

• Guatemala, 1954. The Tenth Inter-American Conference at Caracas adopted the Declaration of Caracas, framing “international communist movement” control of any American state as a threat to the peace — a resolution Washington obtained months before the CIA-backed overthrow of the Árbenz government. Only Guatemala voted against.
• Cuba, 1962. The Eighth Meeting of Consultation at Punta del Este excluded the “present Government of Cuba” from participation, on the reasoning that Marxism-Leninism was incompatible with the inter-American system. The vote required the abstention of six of the largest Latin American states to reach the required majority.
  • The suspension was revoked in 2009 at San Pedro Sula, on the understanding that Cuba’s return would follow a process of dialogue. Cuba has declined to return.
• The Dominican Republic, 1965. After the US landed troops, the OAS retroactively created an Inter-American Peace Force to which Brazil, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Paraguay contributed — the organisation’s most explicit conversion of a unilateral intervention into a collective one.
• Grenada, 1983 and Panama, 1989 ran the other way and are, for that reason, the more revealing cases. The OAS Permanent Council deplored both interventions, and Washington proceeded regardless — demonstrating that the organisation could disapprove but not restrain.
• Funding dependence is structural. The United States has historically supplied roughly half the OAS’s regular budget and a comparable share of the funds that pay for missions, and administrations have used contributions and arrears as leverage.
  • An organisation whose largest contributor is also the state most likely to be complained of has an obvious problem of independence — compounded by a headquarters, working language and diplomatic culture that are all Washington’s.
• The “ministry of colonies” charge — Fidel Castro’s phrase for the OAS, and Hugo Chávez’s after him — is the sharpest expression of the critique: that the Organization exists to give multilateral cover to unilateral American purposes. It is the charge that the founding of ALBA, UNASUR and CELAC was designed to answer.

The case that the OAS has real independent capacity

• The non-intervention norm is a Latin American achievement written into US-signed law.
  • Charter Articles 19 and 20 — no state may intervene in another’s internal or external affairs, and none may use coercion to force another’s sovereign will — exist because Latin American delegations insisted on them, and they frame every hemispheric crisis since.
• The human-rights system has bitten hardest on states Washington supported. The IACHR’s country reports on Argentina during the Proceso, on Chile under Pinochet and on Central America in the 1980s are among the most consequential documents any regional body has produced.
  • The Inter-American Court’s jurisprudence on enforced disappearance, amnesty laws and reparations has shaped international law well beyond the region.
  • The United States has signed but never ratified the American Convention on Human Rights and does not accept the Court’s jurisdiction — a standing asymmetry that the region’s smaller states raise routinely.
• The democracy machinery has been used against US preferences as well as with them. The Organization’s insistence on Zelaya’s restoration in Honduras went further than Washington was comfortable with, and OAS electoral observation has produced findings inconvenient to friendly governments.
• Latin American states have used the OAS as a bloc. On Cuba’s readmission in 2009, on the Colombia–Ecuador crisis of 2008 and on the Honduran suspension, the Latin American and Caribbean majority carried decisions the United States did not initiate.
• The strongest evidence of the counter-case is negative: the United States has repeatedly bypassed the OAS precisely because it could not control it, acting through the Rio Treaty, through coalitions of the willing, or unilaterally.

The OAS has never been able to stop the United States; it has periodically been able to make Washington pay a price in law and legitimacy for not stopping.

The OAS after 2025: Ramdin, Venezuela and the “zone of peace”

• Albert Ramdin of Suriname was elected Secretary General on 10 March 2025 and took office on 30 May 2025 for a five-year term — the first Caribbean national to hold the post, elected with CARICOM’s fifteen votes at the core of his coalition.
  • His stated approach has been to restore consensus after a decade in which the office was itself a source of division.
• The Venezuela question has been the standing test of the Organization’s coherence for a decade.
  • The Maduro government denounced the Charter in April 2017; the denunciation would have taken effect in 2019, but the Organization instead seated a representative of the Juan Guaidó interim administration, leaving Venezuela’s status contested and, after the interim government dissolved in 2022, unresolved.
  • Nicaragua’s withdrawal took effect on 19 November 2023, two years after notification, under the Charter’s two-year denunciation clause — the first completed withdrawal in the Organization’s history.
• The 10th Summit of the Americas, due at Punta Cana in December 2025, was postponed by the Dominican Republic on 3 November 2025, the host citing “deep divisions” in the region. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela had not been invited; Mexico and Colombia had said they would stay away on that account.
• In January 2026 the United States struck targets in Venezuela and Nicolás Maduro was captured, an intervention that dominated hemispheric politics for the rest of the year and split the region openly.
  • Ramdin’s statement of 3–4 January 2026 insisted that “all actors must fully respect international law and the applicable inter-American legal framework, including the peaceful settlement of disputes, respect for human rights, and the protection of civilian life.” He convened a Special Meeting of the Permanent Council.
  • Governments divided along the region’s existing fault line. Brazil’s Lula called the strikes “a very serious affront to the sovereignty of Venezuela” and joined a rejection statement with Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain; Petro sought a UN Security Council meeting; Sheinbaum invoked the UN Charter. Argentina’s Javier Milei welcomed Maduro’s capture.
  • CARICOM’s Bureau met on 3 January 2026 and called for peaceful dialogue through diplomatic channels, restating the region’s commitment to remaining a Zone of Peace.
• The “zone of peace” formula is the region’s own legal vocabulary, not a rhetorical flourish — descending from CELAC’s Havana Proclamation of 2014 and from the Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967), which made the region the first inhabited nuclear-weapon-free zone.
  • CARICOM had already invoked it against the US military build-up on 18 October 2025, expressing “unequivocal support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of countries in the Region” — with Trinidad and Tobago reserving its position, a reservation that measures how far collective Caribbean diplomacy can be stretched.
• The episode is best read as confirming both halves of the OAS argument: the Organization’s law and its Secretary General’s language framed the regional response, and neither restrained the intervention.

The structuralist origins of Latin American integration

• Latin American regionalism has an intellectual founder in a way that few regional projects do. The Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC/CEPAL), created by the UN in 1948 and led from 1950 by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, supplied both the diagnosis and the prescription.
• The diagnosis was structural. The world economy was divided into an industrial centre and a primary-producing periphery, and the terms of trade moved secularly against the periphery — the argument that runs through to the New International Economic Order, which the published note on that subject develops.
• The prescription was import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) behind protective tariffs, and regional integration entered as the fix for ISI’s own defect: national markets were too small to support industry at efficient scale.
  • Integration in Latin America was thus conceived as an instrument of protection rather than of liberalisation — the reverse of the European logic.
• This origin explains a permanent feature of Latin American blocs: they are built to negotiate collectively with the outside world at least as much as to trade internally, which is why their external agreements are often more consequential than their internal ones.

The first generation of agreements

• ALADI’s contribution was conceptual and lasting: by abandoning the requirement that everyone liberalise together, it legalised variable geometry in Latin America two decades before the term became current in Europe, and every sub-regional bloc since has been built inside its framework.
• The Andean Pact is the cautionary case. It had a court with binding jurisdiction and a body of secondary law — the institutional apparatus that Mercosur deliberately refused — and it still could not survive the ideological swings of its members.

CARICOM: small states and the economics of voice

• The Caribbean Community was established by the Treaty of Chaguaramas in 1973, succeeding CARIFTA, and today has fifteen member states together with associate members among the British overseas territories. It is the longest continuously functioning integration scheme in the developing world.
• The founding logic is the economics of small states: national markets of a few hundred thousand people, extreme export concentration, exposure to hurricanes and to commodity and tourism cycles, and diplomatic establishments too small to cover a global agenda alone.

The single market and the movement of people

• The CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) was mandated by the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (2001) and provides for free movement of goods, services, capital and skilled professionals, a common external tariff, and the right of establishment.
• Free movement of skills has been extended by categories rather than by a general right — university graduates first, then media workers, sportspersons, musicians, artists, nurses, teachers, and later domestic workers, agricultural workers and security guards — a category-by-category approach that leaves most Caribbean nationals outside it.
• Full free movement began on 1 October 2025 for Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines under an Enhanced Cooperation Protocol, whose nationals may live and work in each other’s territories without restriction.
  • This is variable geometry made explicit: a coalition of the willing moving ahead where the Community as a whole would not.
• The single economy — a common currency, harmonised fiscal and monetary policy — has never been attempted seriously. Only the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, a sub-set of eight members and territories sharing the EC dollar, achieves monetary integration, and it predates the CSME.

The Caribbean Court of Justice

• The Caribbean Court of Justice was established by agreement in 2001 and inaugurated at Port of Spain on 16 April 2005, and has two quite different jurisdictions.
  • Its original jurisdiction is compulsory and exclusive for the interpretation and application of the Revised Treaty — making it, unlike most developing-world regional courts, a real dispute-settlement organ with a body of case law on the CSME.
  • Its appellate jurisdiction replaces the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the final court of appeal — and here it has struggled.
• Only five states accept the appellate jurisdiction: Barbados and Guyana (2005), Belize (2010), Dominica (2015) and Saint Lucia (2023). Referendums to make the change were defeated in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2009) and in both Antigua and Barbuda and Grenada (2018).
• The Court is funded through a Trust Fund capitalised through the Caribbean Development Bank, so judicial salaries do not depend on annual appropriations — an innovative solution to judicial independence in small states.
• The retention of the Privy Council by ten members is the sharpest illustration of the Community’s central difficulty: the willingness to integrate stops precisely where sovereignty over final decisions begins.

Collective diplomacy: the real achievement

• CARICOM’s most consequential output is not trade policy but coordinated foreign policy, run through the Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR). Fifteen votes in the UN General Assembly, cast together, buy influence out of all proportion to a combined population of under twenty million — on climate, on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, and on the law of the sea.
• Climate negotiation is the clearest case. Caribbean states, working with the Alliance of Small Island States, drove the 1.5°C temperature goal into the Paris Agreement against the preference of the major emitters, and have pressed the loss-and-damage agenda and the reform of concessional-finance eligibility rules that exclude middle-income small islands.
• The CARICOM Reparations Commission, established in 2013, adopted a Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice covering a formal apology, repatriation, an indigenous peoples’ development programme, cultural institutions, the public-health crisis, illiteracy eradication, an African knowledge programme, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and debt cancellation.
  • The African Union made reparations its theme for 2025 — Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations — and the Africa–CARICOM process has since become the principal transregional coalition on the question, linking the two regions treated in this article through a shared historical claim.
• On the Guyana–Venezuela border controversy CARICOM has been united, backing Guyana’s recourse to the International Court of Justice and the 1899 arbitral award, and this is the issue on which its collective diplomacy has been most tested and least divided.

The limits

• Economic disparity among members is wide — Trinidad and Tobago’s hydrocarbon economy, Guyana’s new oil wealth, Jamaica’s and Barbados’s services economies, and the small commodity exporters of the Eastern Caribbean have systematically different interests.
• The common external tariff divides the membership structurally. Members with domestic manufacturing want protection; import-dependent and tourism-dependent members experience the same tariff as a tax on inputs and on the cost of living. Derogations and suspensions accordingly proliferate.
• Implementation lags decisions. The Community’s own reviews have repeatedly found that a large share of CSME regimes agreed by Heads of Government remain incompletely transposed into national law, and the Revised Treaty gives the Secretariat no enforcement power.
• Resource constraints are absolute. Small administrations cannot staff the technical work that integration requires, and a substantial part of the Community’s programme budget comes from external development partners, which shapes what gets done.
• Brain drain is a first-order structural problem, with emigration rates of the tertiary-educated among the highest in the world — the same free movement of skills that integration promotes also functions as a channel out of the region.
• Diversity of language, legal system and size — English-speaking common-law states alongside Haiti and Suriname — complicates every attempt at harmonisation.

CARICOM has converted smallness into diplomatic weight far more successfully than it has converted proximity into trade.

MERCOSUR: a customs union built to lock in democracy

Origins in the Argentine–Brazilian rapprochement

• Mercosur’s true origin is bilateral and political, not multilateral and economic. The Foz do Iguaçu Declaration of 1985 between Argentina’s Raúl Alfonsín and Brazil’s José Sarney, and the integration programme and treaty that followed in 1986 and 1988, ended a rivalry that had included competing nuclear programmes.
• Two civilian presidents emerging from military rule used integration to make their transitions irreversible — binding the armed forces into cooperation with the historic enemy, and creating external constituencies with a stake in constitutional government. Reciprocal nuclear inspection and the joint accounting agency ABACC belong to the same design.
• The Treaty of Asunción, signed on 26 March 1991 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, converted the bilateral programme into a four-member bloc with a common market as its declared goal. Its preamble speaks of accelerating economic development “with social justice” and improving the living conditions of the members’ peoples.

Institutional design: deliberately light

• The Ouro Preto Protocol (December 1994) gave Mercosur international legal personality and its permanent structure — and deliberately withheld supranationality.
  • The Common Market Council (CMC), of foreign and economy ministers with heads of state at summits, is the highest decision-making organ.
  • The Common Market Group (CMG) is the executive body, staffed by officials from foreign ministries, economy ministries and central banks, working through sectoral technical subgroups on industry, agriculture, customs, standards and the rest.
  • The Trade Commission administers the common external tariff; the Parlasur (Mercosur Parliament, 2005) is consultative; the Permanent Review Tribunal (Olivos Protocol, 2002) hears disputes but issues awards that are enforced by the states themselves.
• Decisions are taken by consensus with all members present, and they require incorporation into national law before they take effect. There is no direct effect, no primacy and no commission with a right of initiative — the opposite of the European method, and a design choice, not an oversight.
• The Ushuaia Protocol (1998) is the democratic clause: the full validity of democratic institutions is an essential condition for participation, and its rupture permits measures up to suspension of membership rights. It was invoked against Paraguay in 2012 after the summary impeachment of President Fernando Lugo.

An imperfect customs union

• Mercosur is a customs union in law and an incomplete one in fact. Around nine-tenths of intra-bloc trade moves duty-free, and a common external tariff applies to most imports — but the tariff is riddled with national exception lists.
• The scale of the exceptions is the measure of the problem: Argentina and Brazil each maintain roughly a hundred exceptions, Uruguay over two hundred and Paraguay several hundred, and sugar and automobiles have never been brought inside the common regime at all.
• The absence of a common customs code and of revenue-sharing means goods entering the bloc are taxed again when they cross an internal border, so the customs union does not deliver the single administrative space its label implies.
• Free movement of persons is real but limited. The Residence Agreement (2002) entitles nationals of member and associated states to temporary and then permanent residence on proof of nationality and a clean record, and intra-bloc travel uses national identity documents.

Membership: Venezuela and Bolivia

• Venezuela acceded as a full member in 2012, admitted while Paraguay was itself suspended under Ushuaia and therefore unable to block it — a manoeuvre that damaged the bloc’s legal credibility.
• Venezuela was suspended in December 2016 for failing to incorporate the bloc’s acquis, and again in August 2017 under the Ushuaia Protocol for rupture of the democratic order. The suspension remains in force.
• Bolivia signed an accession protocol in 2015 and the last member ratification came in 2024, opening a transition in which it must adopt the common external tariff and the body of Mercosur law. It is not yet fully incorporated into the customs union, and attended the EU signature as a guest.
• Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname are associate members with tariff preferences but no part in the customs union.

The trade record

• The first decade was a genuine success: intra-bloc trade rose roughly tenfold in the 1990s, and Mercosur was for a time the most-cited developing-country integration scheme in the world.
• The record since has been of long decline. Intra-bloc trade peaked at around $54 billion in 2011 and has fallen to roughly $47 billion, representing only about 11–12% of members’ total exports — close to where the share stood before the bloc existed, and among the lowest ratios in its history.
• The displacement is external and it is Chinese. China is Mercosur’s largest trading partner, taking on the order of a quarter of the bloc’s external trade, with the European Union around a sixth. Members export soy, iron ore, beef and oil to Asia and Europe rather than manufactures to each other.
• Macroeconomic divergence between Argentina and Brazil is the recurring internal cause. Brazil’s 1999 devaluation, Argentina’s 2001–02 collapse, and repeated currency and capital-control divergences since have made the relative price of intra-bloc trade unpredictable, and both governments have periodically resorted to non-tariff restrictions against each other.
• Asymmetry is built in. Brazil and Argentina account for over 90% of the bloc’s GDP, and Paraguay and Uruguay have consistently argued that the benefits are unequally distributed — the Structural Convergence Fund (FOCEM, 2004) was created to address this and remains small.
• Uruguay has pushed hardest against the rule that members may not negotiate alone, opening talks with China and seeking CPTPP accession in defiance of CMC Decision 32/00, which requires third-party agreements to be negotiated jointly. Javier Milei‘s Argentina presses the same demand from the opposite ideological pole.

The external turn and the European agreement

• The EU–Mercosur negotiation ran a quarter of a century from the Interregional Framework Cooperation Agreement of 1995, repeatedly stalling on European agricultural protection and on European conditionality over Amazon deforestation.
• Political agreement was reached on 6 December 2024 and the texts were signed on 17 January 2026 in Paraguay. The package was split in two: an EU–Mercosur Partnership Agreement, requiring ratification by every EU member state, and an Interim Trade Agreement, requiring only EU-level ratification.
• The Interim Trade Agreement has been provisionally applied since 1 May 2026, with European Parliament consent still outstanding. Tariffs are to be removed on over 90% of goods over a fifteen-year phase-in.
• Mercosur’s first agreement with a major trading partner and a vindication of the bloc’s original purpose — collective negotiation rather than internal liberalisation. Mercosur has also concluded agreements with Singapore (2023) and EFTA, and holds partial-scope arrangements with India, Egypt, Israel and the Southern African Customs Union.
• The paradox is exact: the bloc’s greatest success is an external agreement concluded at the point of its weakest internal cohesion.

The sovereignty wave: ALBA, UNASUR, CELAC and the politics of proliferation

• From around 2004 a second kind of Latin American regionalism appeared — explicitly political, explicitly anti-hegemonic, and built by the region’s left governments during the commodity boom. It did not replace the trade blocs; it was layered on top of them.
• ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, 2004) began as a Cuban–Venezuelan agreement offering an alternative to the proposed hemispheric free trade area, based on solidarity and complementarity rather than comparative advantage.
  • Its instruments were barter and subsidy, not tariff reduction — Venezuelan oil for Cuban doctors and teachers; PetroCaribe (2005), supplying oil to Caribbean and Central American states on concessional long-term credit; and the SUCRE, a virtual unit of account launched in 2010 for settling intra-ALBA trade without US dollars.
  • ALBA’s reach contracted sharply when oil prices fell. PetroCaribe had bought Venezuela substantial support among CARICOM members, and its decline is part of why Caribbean positions on Venezuela later fragmented.
• UNASUR (2008) was Brazil’s project rather than Venezuela’s — a South American union of twelve states with a security council, a defence council and a headquarters at Quito, deliberately excluding the United States and Mexico.
  • Its successes were in crisis management: mediating Bolivia’s near-secession crisis in 2008, defusing the Colombia–Ecuador and Colombia–Venezuela confrontations, and observing elections — functions the OAS could not perform without the United States in the room.
  • It collapsed after 2018. Six members suspended participation in April 2018 over the failure to appoint a Secretary General; Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay withdrew or announced withdrawal in 2018–20. Argentina rejoined in 2023, Brazil in 2023 and Colombia in December 2023, but the organisation has not recovered its functions.
• PROSUR (2019) was the right-leaning governments’ replacement for UNASUR, minimal in structure and conditioned on democracy. It became inactive within three years as its founding governments lost office — the mirror image of UNASUR’s fate.
• CELAC (2010, formally constituted 2011) is the most durable of the sovereignty-first bodies: thirty-three states, the entire hemisphere except the United States and Canada, with no secretariat, no treaty and a rotating pro tempore presidency.
  • Its function is to exist: a forum in which the region speaks without Washington present, and a counterpart for external partners. The Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace (Havana, 2014) is its principal normative output.
  • It has revived under successive left-leaning presidencies — Mexico’s from 2020, Colombia’s from April 2025, and Uruguay’s from the Bogotá summit of March 2026.
  • The China–CELAC Forum (2015) is now the principal institutional channel of Chinese engagement with the region; the IV EU–CELAC Summit at Santa Marta, Colombia, 9–10 November 2025 was notable chiefly for the heads of state who stayed away amid US pressure.
• The Bank of the South (2007), signed by seven states, was to fund development without IMF or World Bank conditionality. It never began operations.
• The Pacific Alliance (2011) — Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru — is the market-liberal counter-model: near-total tariff elimination, integrated stock exchanges through MILA, visa-free movement and an Asia-Pacific orientation. It is the one bloc built for trade rather than for voice, and it too slowed as governments changed.

Why so many organisations and so few that endure

• Latin American regionalism cycles with the ideological complexion of its governments. Each political turn produces a new organisation expressing the incoming consensus rather than reforming the one it inherited, because the inherited body carries the previous consensus in its founding documents.
• The result is layered and overlapping membership — a state may simultaneously belong to Mercosur, ALADI, UNASUR, CELAC, the OAS and a set of bilateral agreements, with commitments that are not mutually consistent and secretariats that duplicate each other.
• Nothing in the design generates its own constituency. Because these bodies are intergovernmental, unfunded and without direct effect on citizens, no domestic interest forms around their survival, and a change of president is sufficient to end participation.

How far has the region actually countered the US-led economic order?

What it amounts to

• A body of law. The non-intervention norm, the Calvo and Drago doctrines against gunboat debt collection, the Zone of Peace proclamation and Tlatelolco are Latin American contributions to international law that constrain the vocabulary in which intervention can be justified, even when they do not prevent it.
• A defeated free trade area. The Free Trade Area of the Americas, launched at the Miami Summit in 1994 with a 2005 deadline, was killed at the Fourth Summit of the Americas, Mar del Plata, November 2005, when the four Mercosur states and Venezuela refused to set a date for resuming talks — the clearest instance of the region blocking a US-designed economic order.
• Diversification of partners. China’s rise as the largest trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and as Mercosur’s largest external market, has given governments an exit option that did not exist in 1990 — and the EU–Mercosur agreement adds a second.
• South–South institutional presence.Brazil is a founding member of BRICS, whose expansion since 2024 has brought in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Indonesia, with Saudi Arabia invited but not having confirmed accession.
  • Bolivia and Cuba are partner countries; Argentina declined its invitation under Milei. The New Development Bank, with Brazil a founding shareholder, lends in local currencies.
• De-dollarisation talk. The SUCRE, Brazilian–Argentine local-currency settlement, and Lula’s repeated advocacy of trade settled in national currencies constitute a persistent argument rather than an achieved system.

What it does not amount to

• No common currency, and no serious institutional project for one. The SUCRE was a unit of account for a small volume of barter trade.
• No deepening of intra-regional trade. Mercosur’s internal share has fallen back to pre-integration levels, and intra-Latin American trade as a whole remains a modest fraction of the region’s commerce.
• No collective response to the 2026 Venezuela crisis. The region divided, and the bodies designed for exactly this contingency — CELAC, UNASUR, the OAS — produced statements rather than a position.
• Continued financial dependence. Argentina’s repeated recourse to the IMF, dollarisation debates, and the region’s reliance on dollar-denominated debt markets have not been altered by any regional institution; the Bank of the South never opened.
• The counter-order is normative and diplomatic rather than material. Latin America has changed what can be said and who must be consulted; it has not changed the currency in which it borrows, the market in which it prices its commodities, or the power that can act unilaterally in its neighbourhood.

Africa: the argument at the founding

• Pan-Africanism arrived with two incompatible programmes, and the choice between them determined the shape of African regionalism for forty years.
• Kwame Nkrumah argued for immediate continental political union — a United States of Africa with a common government, army and citizenship.
  • His case: colonial partition had left units too small to be viable or independent, and unity postponed would be unity abandoned, because each new state would grow a class with an interest in its own sovereignty.
• The Casablanca Group (Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Egypt, Libya) took this radical position. The larger Monrovia Group (Nigeria, Liberia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Tunisia and most francophone states) took the gradualist one: sovereign equality first, cooperation by function, unity as an eventual outcome.
• The Organisation of African Unity, founded at Addis Ababa on 25 May 1963, settled the dispute in the gradualists’ favour. Its Charter enshrined sovereign equality, non-interference in internal affairs, respect for the territorial integrity of each state, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Nkrumah’s continental government was not adopted.
• The Cairo Resolution of 1964 completed the settlement by pledging members to respect the borders existing at independence — converting colonial administrative lines into international frontiers as a matter of African law.
  • The reasoning was that reopening borders would produce continental war; the cost was the permanent entrenchment of an irrational political geography.

The OAU’s record: decolonisation and conflict

• On its declared primary purpose the OAU succeeded. Its Liberation Committee at Dar es Salaam channelled funds, arms, training and recognition to liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies, Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa, and its coordination made the isolation of apartheid South Africa effective.
• On conflict within African states the record is one of near-total failure, and the cause is the organisation’s founding design rather than a want of will.
  • Non-interference made intra-state conflict constitutionally invisible. The OAU could not put a civil war on its agenda without a member’s consent, and no government consents to international scrutiny of its own war.
  • Biafra (1967–70): the OAU backed Nigerian unity and treated secession as an internal matter, and only four members recognised Biafra. Whatever the merits, the organisation had no capacity to protect civilians.
  • Western Sahara split the organisation instead of settling it: the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in 1982–84 caused Morocco to leave, and it did not return until 2017.
  • Rwanda, 1994: the OAU had neither intelligence, nor force, nor legal standing to act during the genocide. Its own subsequent inquiry, the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities, was unsparing about the failure of Africa and the world alike.
  • The Great Lakes wars that followed drew in nine states and the organisation played no significant role in ending them.
• A Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution was created at Cairo in 1993, but it had no standing force, no reliable funding and no authority to act without consent — and it did not alter the Rwandan outcome a year later.
• The “dictators’ club” charge is the summary criticism: an organisation of heads of state, operating by consensus, with non-interference as its cardinal rule, functioned as a mutual-protection society for incumbents. Idi Amin chaired it in 1975–76.

An organisation built on non-interference to protect fragile new states could not, by construction, act on what those states did to their own people.

From the OAU to the African Union

• The Sirte Declaration of 9 September 1999 reopened Nkrumah’s argument. Muammar Gaddafi proposed an immediate United States of Africa with a single government, army and currency; Nigeria, South Africa and most others again preferred a gradual treaty-based union. The compromise was a new organisation with new powers but not a continental state.
• The Constitutive Act was adopted at Lomé on 11 July 2000, entered into force on 26 May 2001, and the African Union was formally launched at Durban on 9 July 2002.
• Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act is the decisive change and the single most important thing to say about the Union: it establishes “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.”
  • This reverses the OAU’s founding principle. Sovereignty within the Union is conditional on a minimum standard of conduct toward one’s own population, and Africa adopted the proposition three years before the UN World Summit endorsed the responsibility to protect.
  • Article 4(j) preserves the converse right of a member state to request Union intervention to restore peace and security, and Article 4(p) and Article 30 bar governments that come to power by unconstitutional means from participating in Union activities.
  • Article 4(h) has never been formally invoked, and the gap between the norm and its use is the central critique of the Union’s peace architecture.

Structure and the peace and security architecture

• The Assembly of Heads of State and Government is supreme; the Executive Council of foreign ministers prepares its work; the Commission at Addis Ababa is the secretariat, chaired since 2025 by Mahmoud Ali Youssouf of Djibouti.
• The Pan-African Parliament (Midrand, 2004) remains consultative, its legislative protocol unratified; ECOSOCC gives civil society a weak formal channel; the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Arusha, 2006) hears cases, but few states allow direct access for individuals and NGOs and several have withdrawn it.
• The Peace and Security Council, operational from 2004, is the Union’s standing organ for conflict — fifteen members, decisions by two-thirds where consensus fails, and, unlike the UN Security Council, no veto and no permanent membership.
• The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) comprises the PSC, the Continental Early Warning System, the Panel of the Wise, the Peace Fund, and the African Standby Force.
  • The Standby Force, declared operational in 2016 with five regional brigades, has never been deployed as designed — for want of funding, strategic lift and the willingness of regional communities to place brigades under continental command. A memorandum formalising rapid deployment with those communities was adopted at the 39th Assembly in February 2026.
  • The Peace Fund was recapitalised toward a $400 million target; a proposal at the 2026 summit to raise it to $1 billion was noted without decision. African peace operations continue to depend on UN and European financing.
• The African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (adopted 2007, in force 2012) defines unconstitutional changes of government to include coups, mercenary intervention, refusal to cede power after an election, and constitutional amendments that infringe democratic change.

Suspension and its diminishing returns

• The Union suspends members whose governments seize power unconstitutionally, and it does so consistently: Mali (2020, 2021), Guinea (2021), Sudan (2021), Burkina Faso (2022), Niger (2023), Gabon (2023), and lately Madagascar and Guinea-Bissau. Gabon’s and Guinea’s suspensions were lifted after elections; six members remained suspended through 2026.
• Consistency has not produced deterrence. Suspension excludes a junta from meetings it has little interest in attending, and the Union has no economic instrument behind it. Where sanctions bit, a regional community imposed them — ECOWAS on Mali and Niger.
• The deeper difficulty is that constitutional manipulation by incumbents, which the Charter also prohibits, is almost never treated as an unconstitutional change of government, so the rule falls with full force on soldiers and not at all on presidents.

RECs, Agenda 2063 and the continental market

• Agenda 2063, adopted in 2015, is the Union’s fifty-year framework — “The Africa We Want” — seven aspirations delivered through ten-year plans, the second running from 2024 to 2033. Its flagship projects include the continental free trade area, a single air transport market and the free movement protocol.
• Eight regional economic communities are recognised as the Union’s building blocs: ECOWAS, SADC, EAC, COMESA, ECCAS, IGAD, AMU and CEN-SAD.
  • The Arab Maghreb Union has been dormant since 1994 because of the Algeria–Morocco rupture over Western Sahara — the clearest case of a bilateral dispute freezing an entire sub-region.
  • Overlapping membership is the structural pathology. Most African states belong to two or more communities with different tariff schedules, rules of origin and timetables, so one consignment may face several conflicting preferential regimes — the spaghetti-bowl problem at its most acute.
  • The Tripartite Free Trade Area of COMESA, EAC and SADC was an attempt to rationalise it; the AfCFTA is the continental version of the same logic.
• ECOWAS is the community with the strongest security record. Its ECOMOG forces intervened in Liberia from 1990 and Sierra Leone from 1997, the first sustained sub-regional peace enforcement anywhere in the developing world, undertaken without prior UN authorisation and later endorsed.
  • ECOWAS’s authority collapsed over the Sahel coups. After sanctions and the threat of force following Niger’s 2023 coup, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger formed the Alliance of Sahel States, upgraded it to a confederation in 2024, and announced withdrawal from ECOWAS.
  • The withdrawal took effect on 29 January 2025. ECOWAS granted transitional arrangements preserving free movement, recognition of ECOWAS travel documents and trade benefits under the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme, and kept the door open — a pragmatic retreat from the coercive line that produced the rupture.
  • The three have created a joint force, a common passport and a levy on ECOWAS imports; the loss of roughly half the community’s land area is the most serious reverse African regionalism has suffered.

The African Continental Free Trade Area

• The AfCFTA agreement was adopted at Kigali in March 2018, entered into force on 30 May 2019, and trading under it began on 1 January 2021. Fifty-four of the AU’s fifty-five member states have signed; Eritrea has not.
• It is the largest free trade area in the world by number of participating states, covering roughly 1.4 billion people.
• The Guided Trade Initiative, launched in October 2022 with eight participants — Kenya, Rwanda, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Mauritius, Tanzania and Tunisia — tests the operational machinery on real consignments and has since expanded. Its volumes remain small; its purpose is proof of concept.
• The goods protocol targets 90% of tariff lines, with longer schedules for sensitive products and for least-developed members. Protocols on services, investment, intellectual property, competition, digital trade and women and youth in trade have been concluded in successive phases.
• Rules of origin remain incomplete in textiles and clothing, processed foods and parts of the automotive and industrial sectors — precisely the value-added goods the agreement is meant to promote. Each unresolved line is a contest between industrialising and importing members.
• The World Bank projects intra-African trade up by roughly 52% by 2035 under full implementation, with substantial income and poverty effects.
• The honest constraint is that tariffs were never the binding one. Intra-African trade runs at about 15% of the continent’s total trade — roughly $210 billion in 2025.
  • The causes are transport costs, non-tariff barriers, border delays, payment frictions, and the fact that most African states export competing primary commodities to the same external markets rather than complementary goods to each other.
• The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), developed with the African Export-Import Bank and operational from 2025, allows cross-border payment in local currencies without a hard-currency correspondent, with expected savings on foreign-exchange costs of a fifth to a third.

The African Union as a global actor

• The AU became a permanent member of the G20 at the New Delhi summit in September 2023, the first addition to the group’s membership since its formation and the only one comparable to the European Union’s seat. India’s presidency proposed and secured it.
• The Ezulwini Consensus (2005) is the common African position on UN Security Council reform: two permanent seats with full veto rights and five non-permanent seats for Africa, on the argument that the continent is the subject of most Security Council business and the only region without permanent representation.
  • Its insistence on the veto — if the veto is unjust it should be abolished, and if it exists Africa must have it — keeps the African group apart from the G4 position, and that divergence is a principal reason reform has not advanced.
• The AU negotiates as a bloc in climate diplomacy through the African Group of Negotiators, pressing adaptation finance, loss and damage, and reform of the credit-rating rules that raise Africa’s cost of capital. The Nairobi Declaration of the 2023 Africa Climate Summit is its consolidated statement.
• The Union’s structural weakness is financial. Much of its programme budget and most of its peace operations have been externally funded, and the 0.2% levy on eligible imports agreed at Kigali in 2016 to make the Union self-financing has been implemented by a minority of members.

India in the Americas and Africa

India and Africa

• India’s African engagement rests on a claim of shared historical position — anti-colonial solidarity, the Bandung inheritance, and the argument that India offers partnership without conditionality or resource capture. The three principles Indian policy repeats are African priorities, African capacity and no debt burden.
• The India–Africa Forum Summit process began in New Delhi (2008), continued at Addis Ababa (2011) and returned to New Delhi in 2015, when all fifty-four African states were invited.
  • The fourth summit was held in New Delhi on 31 May 2026 after an eleven-year gap, covering trade, defence, critical minerals, energy, space, health, skills and climate action.
• The instruments are concessional and capacity-building rather than infrastructure-financing at scale.
  • More than 190 lines of credit worth over $10 billion have been extended to 41 African states, financing some 220 completed projects worth about $4.5 billion.
  • ITEC and ICCR scholarships, the Pan-African e-Network and its successor e-VidyaBharati and e-ArogyaBharati in tele-education and telemedicine, and Indian training for African militaries and police form the capacity layer.
  • Indian generic pharmaceuticals supply a large share of Africa’s medicines, particularly antiretrovirals, and were central to Indian vaccine supply to the continent; the India–South Africa TRIPS waiver proposal during the pandemic was argued on precisely this basis.
• India–Africa trade stands at roughly $85 billion, making India among Africa’s largest trading partners and top-five investors, with Africa supplying around a tenth of India’s energy imports and, increasingly, critical minerals. India has opened seventeen new missions in Africa since 2018.
• India’s presidency of the G20 delivered the African Union’s permanent seat in September 2023, the most concrete institutional gain India has produced for the continent and the anchor of its claim to speak for the Global South.
• India does not contest China on volume. Chinese trade with Africa is several times India’s and its lending far larger; India’s argument is a different offer — training, medicines, digital public infrastructure and diaspora links rather than turnkey construction.

India, Latin America and the Caribbean

• The relationship is structurally shallow and growing fast. The FOCUS-LAC programme, launched in 1997 and periodically renewed, was India’s first deliberate attempt to raise commercial engagement with a region to which it has no proximity, no colonial connection and no security stake.
• India’s exports to the region reached about $21.5 billion in 2025–26, roughly double the 2015–16 figure — vehicles and motorcycles, chemicals, machinery, pharmaceuticals and textiles, with Brazil and Mexico the principal markets. Crude oil imports ran at about $5.7 billion, mainly from Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.
• The India–Mercosur Preferential Trade Agreement, signed in 2004 and in force since 2009, covers only around 450 tariff lines on each side — among the narrowest India maintains.
  • Widening it has been discussed for over a decade, with a terms-of-reference exercise pursued through 2026; the obstacle is that Decision 32/00 requires the four members to negotiate jointly.
• Bilateral tracks have moved faster than the bloc. India and Chile signed terms of reference for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement in 2025, with critical minerals at its centre; an India–Peru trade agreement has been negotiated on a parallel track.
• The Caribbean engagement runs through CARICOM. At the second India–CARICOM Summit at Georgetown, Guyana, in November 2024, India proposed a seven-pillar framework spelling out the acronym CARICOM.
  • The pillars: capacity building; agriculture and food security; renewable energy and climate change; innovation, technology and trade; cricket and culture; ocean economy and maritime security; and medicine and healthcare — with 1,000 additional ITEC slots over five years.
  • The Indian-origin populations of Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, descended from indentured migration, give the relationship a constituency that the Latin American one lacks.
• India’s interest in both regions is finally about numbers in multilateral forums — support for UN Security Council reform, for a permanent seat, and for the positions India advances as a spokesman of the developing world.
  • The Voice of the Global South Summits, held from January 2023, have drawn well over a hundred developing countries, with African and Caribbean participation heaviest — a vehicle designed to aggregate exactly the constituencies these regional organisations assemble.

Conclusion

These are the two regions where regionalism defends sovereignty rather than pools it, and both show the same gap. The inter-American system produced a real body of law against intervention and could not prevent the interventions; Latin American integration produced a proliferation of blocs and an internal trade share back where it began. Africa converted absolute non-interference into Article 4(h), then found that a right of intervention without a deployable force changes less than it promised. The institutions have been better at securing a hearing than an outcome.