4.3.1 Regionalism in its most broadly accepted sense
The most evident legacy of the post-Cold War was the restoration of a division of the world in a geopolitical sense, distinct from the dominant ideological sense in the confrontation of East and West. But the regions were always there, with their own dynamics and before the balance of terror could even be imagined. Nor is regionalism a new phenomenon. In
93 some cases, this phenomenon even resulted in the creation of states such as the US or Germany, for example. Regionalism has been widely understood as a process through which international institutions emerge and are sustained, which span a regional space in which the members share an identity, and aspire to reinforce it while encouraging mutual cooperation (Farrell and Héritier, 2005). This definition in a positive sense has a correlate in the tacit inverse aspect of regionalism, none other than the exclusivity-inclusivity dichotomy, established under a combination of political criteria based on geographical grounds.
Despite the implicit broadness and potential wealth of the accepted sense of regionalism, this has been studied with greater intensity from the perspective of commercial integration (Hettne et al., 2001; Solingen, 2014). This, of course, does not mean a mistake, and nor is it an inexplicable phenomenon. Regionalism has been widely studied from the angle of International Political Economy insofar as it has largely reflected the advances of the EU project, an originally economic mechanism, whose security had been guaranteed by another structure: NATO’s umbrella (Jones, 2003; Rosato, 2011). The confrontation between great powers –defined by, among other things, their capacity to project power and influence beyond their immediate peripheries– left regions as anecdotal facts and subsystems with their own capacity to provide security. Studies on alliances also contributed to minimising the role of the region in international security, as collective defence agreements generally included one or more extra-regional great power. Hence, studies on security regionalism have occupied a secondary place.
The lessons from the South American case are telling in this sense. Regionalism in its broadly accepted form, the economic, has a long history in Latin America in general. This is explained by interests in development and autonomy, but also by the context of the Cold War in which the definition of threats was linked early to the institutionalisation of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR with its Spanish initials, also known as the “Rio Pact”) of September 2nd, 1947. Hence, economic integration mechanisms and schemes have prospered, while security regionalism hardly have appeared in an international scenario of accelerated deconcentration of power. This claim is reinforced by the hypothesis that South America, still in the hemispheric security perimeter of the US, has been functioning as an international subsystem in which direct US intervention has been more potential than real (Mares 2001; Teixeira 2012), so the absence of a regional
94 security mechanism cannot be explained by a supposed hegemony or American military presence.
Thus, regionalism in South America has been concentrated in economic aspects, above all commercial ones, which follows a widely spread international pattern. This experience has been replicated in other sectors of intraregional cooperation in which national security, defence policy and foreign policy autonomy would not be directly exposed. This has not guaranteed the success of economic regionalism, but it has given way to the institutionalisation of regional cooperation in aspects that are not central to Westphalian sovereignty. Understanding the distinctive nature of security regionalism is key to explaining the mechanisms behind the paradox of autonomy.
4.3.2 Security regionalism is different
Few aspects of public policy are as capable of putting sovereignty and, of course, autonomy, at risk as defence policy. In a broad sense, interior security policy and foreign policy are articulated with national defence policy. This broad set of policies can be attributed to the objectives of the preservation of the great national strategy. The existential sense of defence policy is, in itself, an obstacle for supranational security mechanisms, above all when the potential partners are part of the same region or international subsystem.
Security regionalism, which would contemplate the possibility of some coordination of national defence policies, lies at the base of the basic needs of states. Even within the framework of advanced regional schemes, such as the EU and its office of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, coordination of foreign and defence policy is little more than symbolic, with member states reserving the form, degree and moment of acting diplomatically and militarily (Kelly, 2007).
Almost as a general rule, it is understood that security agreements indicate two widely spread schemes: (a) collective security, which is to say, mechanisms to avoid aggressions between the parties, and/or (b) collective defence, to dissuade or reject external threats to the parties. Security regionalism could respond to one or both schemes, but within a common geographical space, forming a geopolitical set, an international subsystem or, to be more precise, a regional security complex (Buzan and Wæver, 2003). To understand why the paradox of autonomy originates, it is necessary to consider one fact: national security and defence are not simply another area in the range of public sectors. This is especially true in the South American reality, which as an international subsystem, has
95 developed in parallel a marked interest in regional autonomy and zeal for national autonomy. Two phenomena explain the specificity of security regionalism in South America, one of a global character and the other rooted in the geopolitics of the region.
The first of these phenomena is the limitation of transferring security and defence tasks to private actors. Although many South American states have had, to a greater or lesser extent, problems in comprehensive territorial control and there is a tendency among some great powers to privatise security work, the transfer does not occur as in other sectors of public policy in which private actors assume core tasks. Firstly, because the identity of the South American nation-state is directly linked to territorial integrity. And in the case of the privatisation of security, this has been happening in extraterritorial operations, such as in the cases of occupied territories in which the political cost of direct action by national armed forces is very high in terms of public opinion, or when one wishes to evade responsibilities derived from international law related to the use of force outside one’s own borders (Nweihed; 1992; Zacher, 2001; Ayoob, 2002). The state continues to be the central actor in national defence.
In the case of the geopolitical reason for the specificity of security regionalism in South America, and its link to regional and national autonomies, there is the latent presence of a superpower that never occupied any territory of the subcontinent, and the persistence of territorial tensions which limited mutual trust and the generation of regional cooperation mechanisms for security and defence. These conditions had a parallel effect with respect to the search for autonomy in South America. This is because, on one hand, it was considered that a goal as important as development must have the possibility of taking and executing political decisions without US tutelage – with which it had maintained an alliance during the Cold War and of a hemispheric hegemony which had as an effective military perimeter the south coast of the Caribbean. And on the other hand, the search for national autonomy in terms of security, because of two factors which generated intraregional mistrust: the first, historical territorial tensions and rivalries, above all among Hispanic American states (Mares, 2001; Franchi et al., 2017); and the second, caution facing the possible materialisation of Brazilian hegemonic primacy (Flemes and Wehner, 2015).
For these reasons, I claim that security regionalism in ontologically different to what can be established in other sectors because it can affect the constitutive structures of the state.
In the case of South America, the historical and geopolitical conditions reinforce the
96 specificity and highlight the possibility of the paradox of autonomy and its dilemmatic consequences.