in the news today, pretty much every country in South America (the sole exception being French Guiana) signed an agreement to eliminate internal tariffs within 10-15 years. they announced their intentions to form a union modeled on that of the EU. a constitution is being drafted next year, and goals include having a common currency, common passports, a parliament, etc.
the new union is called the Comunidad Sudamericana de Naciones/Comunidade Sul-Americana de Nações/South American Community of Nations (CSN). It covers about 6% of the world’s people and 2.7% of GDP.
the CSN has several huge advantages over the EU in terms of integration. there are pretty much only two dominant languages in play, and Spanish and Portuguese are close enough to each other that it's relatively easy to be bilingual. that's not only a huge advantage in terms of administration and logistics, but also in terms of the perceived cultural legitimacy of any parliament or other government.
South America is also younger in terms of demographics. in the EU, support for closer integration gets stronger as the survey subjects get younger, and i would expect that this same pattern is likely to repeat here.
also, i would expect the fact that the institutions of democratic government are very young in many of these countries to work to their advantage. most of these countries have lived through upheaval, coups, wars, and revolution in the past few decades, and many of them only became democracies relatively recently. the level of inertia and cultural attachment to existing institutions which hinders transfer of power from the European national capitals to Brussels is unlikely to exist to the same degree in this case.
obviously, there are problems, extreme poverty, war, and dysfunctional infrastructures among them. Venezuela is deeply polarized, Argentina's seen better days, Colombia's a war-torn mess, etc. it's also worth noting that several of these countries don't have normal diplomatic relationships with each other, which is kind of comical.
however, despite these problems, i think, in general, this is a good thing for the people of South America, and it's likely to work extremely well in terms of integration.
it's also heartening to see this in terms of larger trends. the NAFTA-style FTAA favored by the Americans is basically dead in the water, and instead South America forms a union modeled explicitly on the EU. this is a sign that Europe is winning the war of ideas with the US. developing countries aspiring to a better standard of living are increasingly looking to Brussels, not Washington, and given the relative sanity of European policies as opposed to American ones, that's a good thing. |
