This paper offers a framework to assess the recent proliferation of regional institutions in Latin America. While most previous studies focused either on trade or on security as separate fields, we take into account both economic- and security-driven entities and analyze whether the growing institutional overlap results in coexistence, complementarity, mutual reinforcement, or competition. There are different interpretations of the implications of overlapping regional organizations in Latin America. From one perspective, overlap introduces unhelpful competition between actors, inefficiencies, and transaction costs that end up compromising the objectives of international cooperation. According to this view, the manifestations of segmented and overlapping regionalist projects in Latin America are indicators for the exhaustion of regional integration. Other authors see a new dynamic of a more political and post-hegemonic regionalism that differs from the economic-driven integration schemes of the early 1990s. They emphasize the potential benefits of a “variable geometry” that gives states the possibility to choose among various multilateral forums to voice disagreement without endangering the institutional architecture as a whole.
The recent diagnosis of “institutional elasticity” to describe the European institutional architecture might be a point of reference to understand the dynamics of regional institutional pluralism in Latin America. We argue that institutional elasticity is not a feature unique to the European region, but that Latin America is on its way towards differentiated multilateral cooperation and institutional elasticity, which is likely to lead to more peaceful and stable interstate relations across the region.
