Francisco Dominguez & Marcos Guedes de Oliveira eds.: Mercosur: Between Integration and Democracy.

Francisco Dominguez & Marcos Guedes de Oliveira eds. Mercosur: Between Integration and Democracy Peter Lang, Oxford, 2004, 220 pp. ISBN 3-906769-83-6 (pbk) 28 [pounds sterling]

Mercusor is the result of a treaty signed in 1991 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The aim of the treaty was to foster economic cooperation and to create a common market and customs union. This book about Mercusor is long on detail and short on critical analytical insight. Thus, if you are looking for a general introduction to Mercosur with a politically liberal slant and an ambiguous relationship with liberal economics, then this edited collection will be sufficient. However, if you are looking for a critical political economy approach that analyses the contradictions between neoliberal economic reform and democracy, and between productive economic growth and profit making; or that analyses the role of Mercosur in the international political economy of neoliberalism, and the dominance of neoliberalism in the Southern Cone, then this anthology is theoretically unsatis-factory and, at times, misleading.

It could be argued that one of the edition's strengths is its diversity of theoretical perspective, and its diversity of concept formation. Francisco Dominguez's chapter, 'Democracy and economic integration: The continental context' and Marcos Guedes de Oliveira's chapter, 'Limitations on democratic transitions in Latin America and the fate of Mercosur', offer the most consistent attempts to critically analyse the development of Mercusor by linking it to the national struggles for neoliberal hegemony in the Southern Cone, and to the dominance of neoliberalism in international political economy.

However, Peter Lambert's chapter, 'Paraguay in Mercosur: Para que?' offers a critique of Paraguayan national failures in democratising the state and economy (from a noticeably 'good governance' perspective), with an acceptance that a neoliberal accumulation strategy is the best development strategy for the region. Some chapters, such as Lambert's, look at Mercosur and its shortcomings from a clearly institutionalist perspective. This perspective overlooks the conditions of national class struggle that both shaped the formation of Mercusor, and are embedded in its reproduction. Then there are those such as Marcos Costa Lima's chapter, 'Mercosur and the New Global Order: A methodological essay', which view Mercosur as a rational response to globalisation, conceptualised as an economic phenomenon which comprises a new paradigm of industrial production and technological change. This ignores the conditions of international class struggle and the new forms of power relations that characterise the neoliberal, globalised age. Both forms of political economy are unable to conceptualise the interplay of economic and political relations from a critical (Marxist) perspective. One is economist, placing economics outside of politics; the other is structuralist (institutionalist), placing state politics outside of economics. In doing so, globalisation is neither critically disentangled, nor is the relationship of Southern Cone states to neoliberalism problematised. The anthology's melange of analysis therefore works to undermine the development of a more consistent and compelling account of the development, and impact, of Mercosur on its member states and in international politics.

The book's descriptions of the formation of Mercosur, and of its development and internal institutional structure, offer the beginnings of a response to the call for methodological experimentation made in Costa Lima's contribution. The need for inter-disciplinary work that cuts across formalistic academic boundaries, in order to demystify the workings of Southern Cone social reality, is a worthy appeal. Yet the book fails to develop such synthetic analysis, and instead offers a series of mono-theoretical attempts to analyse Mercosur.

However, some elements necessary for a more critically inspired analysis of regional integration can be found in the book. The introductory chapters that discuss globalisation, and link Mercusor to neoliberalism, provide a frame of reference that could enable the development of a political economy of class struggle of the four main partners that comprise the Mercosur bloc. The discussion of Paraguayan politics that highlights the inequality of power relations between Mercosur member states, and Kumar Saha's chapter, 'Coreperiphery in the Americas: Understanding the political economy of Mercosur and the FTAA', which attempts to conceptualise coreperiphery relationships between Mercosur and the us, and within Mercosur, provide us with some tools with which to understand the nature of dependency and uneven and unequal development in the Southern Cone. However, on a theoretical level, the overall impact of the book is under-developed, inconsistent, normatively ambiguous, and politically non-committed.

There is also a case to be made that there is an implicit, and at times explicit, reproduction of international inequalities of power in the work. Contributions such as those from Lambert, Guedes de Oliveira and Almeida Medeiros all posit the EU as the most developed and progressive form of regionalism, and as the model that Mercusor should imitate. This reproduces the classic 'inferiority complex' analysis of much work on South American politics and development, while also bolstering the mythical discourse (of politicians and academics) of 'the West knows and does best'.

In doing so, it masks the relationship between Europe and the Southern Cone, in which the former has consistently pushed upon the region a policy of neoliberalism that has undermined the potential for autonomous development and for popular democracy. It also precludes a more nuanced analysis of the European Union itself, the inequalities of power present within the regional bloc, and the inequalities of power that the bloc seeks to reproduce on an international scale.

Perhaps this leads me onto the final point. The analysis of any political unit, on any territorial scale, cannot be presented as a neutral engagement.

Rather, the theories that are used, the methodological positions that are developed, and the hierarchies of concepts that are proposed are inescapably political. Academic engagement is both constructed by and constructs the world that it seeks to explain. This collection could have done justice to this by being aware of its theoretical assumptions, and of the implications of those assumptions on the study of Southern Cone politics.