Goliath vs. Goliath? The Role of the U.S. and Brazil in Shaping the FTAA.

The proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) is the first empirical case of a preferential trade agreement (PTA) that would merge four extant regional integration schemes (NAFTA, Mercosur, the Andean Community, and CARICOM), which also exhibit different degrees of commitment among the respective member states (a free trade agreement and three customs unions). The comparative literature on regional integration contends that for a PTA to be "successful," understood as the actual implementation of an agreement, the existence of a regional economic hegemon is necessary. On this score, both the NAFTA and Mercosur are considered successful. While the logic of this argument suggests that the success of the FTAA also hinges upon the establishment of a clear hemispheric economic hegemon, Brazil, as the largest economy in the south, is resisting the American vision of the FTAA as a NAFTA writ large. The U.S.' foreign policy response has been to try circumventing Brazilian intransigence by concluding bilateral trade agreements with individual South American countries. Against this backdrop, the paper gauges the theoretical inability in accounting for the stalling of the hemispheric project and the resulting practical aspect of how Brazil attempts to substantiate its determination to prevent an FTAA on U.S. terms via institutional consolidation within Latin America, as well as with a view to the European Union. As a work in progress, the latter aspect is of a very preliminary nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]