Peter H. Smith, director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS) at the University of California, San Diego, and Wolf Grabendorff, a German scholar and director of the Instituto de Relaciones Europeo-Latinoamericanas (IRELA) in Madrid, gathered experts from Europe, the United States, and Latin America to study the contemporary challenges to relations between Europe and the two Americas. The experts came from the academic world—political science, sociology, and environmental studies—and from government service in the areas of economic and social policy and international affairs. They attended research workshops at La Jolla in May 1992 and Madrid in October 1992 to refine their work and exchange perspectives. This collaboration produced the introduction, 14 essays, and conclusion of this book.
To interpret the relationships between Europe and the Americas, the contributors drew on four contemporary regional processes: the European Community (EC), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Southern Cone Common Market, or Mercado Comun del Sur (MERCOSUR), and the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI). For unspecified reasons the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA), and the Central American Common Market (CACM) were excluded, and therefore are seldom mentioned in the essays. The authors avoided questioning whether the EAI, CBI, NAFTA, and other integration projects might be means to facilitate exploitation of Latin America’s land, labor, and resources, especially given the U.S. track record over the past two centuries. The project was organized under the assumption that the EC might offer a model as the New World states contemplated integration. Although the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and other difficulties have called that assumption into question, Smith and Grabendorff continue to assume that union in some form—especially economic—is the wave of the future.
The essays are divided into three sections. Five describe integration’s “Conditions and Contexts,” six treat its “Politics and Policies,” and three respond to the “Organizational Imperatives.” Smith’s concluding essay offers 16 recommendations, related to positions argued in the essays, as guidelines for integration. The sixteenth point is very critical of the “NAFTA-plus” proposal to include a selected few nations—Chile, New Zealand, and others are commonly mentioned. This idea Smith considers to be very ominous and potentially damaging for NAFTA. The book has no index, but does offer list of 70 acronyms (about 20 more are not listed).
In terms of the historical record, the limited free-trade zone along the Río Grande since the late nineteenth century and integration efforts in Central America and through the Pan-American movement are scarcely mentioned. These oversights are regrettable, since one purpose of the project was to acquaint the North American public with the process of regional integration in the Americas. Only the essays by Laurence Whitehead and Ethan Nadelmann give more than passing attention to events before the 1980s. Given this now-and-tomorrow perspective, historians may find these essays of limited use.
