Endorsements

This book examines the motivations for the European Union's (EU) policy towards the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the EU's most important relationship with another regional economic integration organisation. It argues that the dominant explanations in the literature - balancing the US, global aspirations, being an external federator, long-standing economic and cultural ties, economic interdependence, and the Europeanization of Spanish and Portuguese national foreign policies - fail to adequately explain the EU's policy. In particular, these accounts tend to infer the EU's motives from its activity. Drawing extensive primary documents, Arana argues that the major developments in the relationship - the 1992 Inter-institutional Agreement and the 1995 Europe Mercosur Inter-regional Framework Cooperation Agreement - were initiated by Mercosur and supported mainly by Spain. This means that rather than the EU pursuing a strategy, as implied by most of the existing literature, the EU was largely responsive. How it responded to Mercosur's overtures, however, has been influenced by some of the factors highlighted in the literature, most notably the Europeanisation of Portuguese and, particularly, Spanish foreign policies. Also the Commission's role as external federator has influenced as well, although to a lesser extent. Overall, however, these supposedly causal factors have provided only a very weak impetus for EU policy, which explains in large part why the relationship is much less developed than the EU's relations with other parts of the world. The European Union's policy towards Mercosur will benefit academics and postgraduate students of European Union Foreign Affairs, Inter-regionalism and Latin American regionalism.