COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND REGIONAL ORGANISATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA : Explaining Stagnation and Fragmentation of Latin American Regionalism through Regional Agents and Emergent Flexibility Mechanisms

The general purpose of this doctoral thesis is to discover a distinctive form of Latin American regionalism based on a co-constitutive analysis of the structural and agential elements that can explain the bad performance of the main regional organisations. These have followed a path of dependence that has led to permanent stagnation and fragmentation of the regional integration process in this part of the world. Based on the critical junctures events in each regional organisation (RO) analysed, I studied the behaviour of regional actors in the context of each particular institutional design: Andean Community, Common Market of the South, Union of South American Nations, Central American Integration System and the Pacific Alliance. The hypothesis of this research points out that the emergent flexibility mechanism created and used by the socialisation of regional agents in times of institutional crisis generates a path of dependence in Latin American ROs in two ways. The first is stagnation when the collective identity of ROs is strong (institutional rigidity). The second way is fragmentation when the collective identity of ROs is weak (institutional flexibility). The most relevant findings of this research are the discovery of regional agents as an analytical concept not previously described in the specialised literature and their influence on the construction of collective identities and institutional designs of each RO studied. At the same time, the causal mechanism denominated “emergent flexibility” is observed in all the cases selected. This mechanism is activated in moments of crisis by the regional actors themselves. In turn, this mechanism generates stagnation in the functioning of regional institutions (albeit to a lesser extent) and fragmentation (permanent creation of new regional initiatives). However, the activation of the emerging flexibility mechanism can also help resolve regional crises because it generates new normative consensuses that allow for changes in the original institutional design as can be observed in the cases of the Andean Community and the Central American Integration System.