Regional integration and modernity: cross-Atlantic perspectives

This book offers a new framework for comparing experiences of integration: regionalization must be reinterpreted as an aspect of modernization, modernization unfolding also at the local, national and global levels. The contributors discuss how and why the different visions of modernity that inform modernization projects encouraged the construction (or rejection) of regional integration, at different times and in different places. It starts with an analysis of plans for the economic integration of Europe in the aftermath of World War I. It shows how integration was identified as the means to modernize the region with a view to helping it overcome political fragmentation and adapt to new conditions of global capitalism. It then turns to the debate on modernization unfolding in the era that constituted the formative period of integration for both Europe and Latin America. It analyses examples of the complex interaction between these two different experiences, as it extends into the present. Finally, it looks at the social and political actors that promoted integration in the two regions and at the discourse they formulated to do so. Natalie J. Doyle is senior lecturer in French and European studies at Monash University and deputy director of the Monash European and European Union Centre. Lorenza Sebesta, historian, is Jean Monnet professor ad personam at the campus of the University of Bologna in Buenos Aires. Publisher's note.

Interwar plans for European economic integration : an overview / Pierre Tilly and Michel Dumoulin -- International municipalism between the wars : local government as modernizing actors / Mariana Luna Pont -- Talcott Parsons, Carl J. Friedrich and the conceptualization of regional integration / Flora Anderson -- Theories of modernization in Latin America / Jose Paradiso -- Alexandre Kojéve and the re-invention of modernity : the European Communities as the "End of History" / Lorenza Sebesta -- Judicial globalization : the dialogue between the Inter-American and European Courts of Human Rights / Beatriz Larrain -- Agencies to modernize integration? : The European Union and Mercosur as case studies / Sandra Negro -- Government-industry relations in Argentina : trade decisions in Mercosur / Luciana Gil -- Multinational companies and the peripheral automotive space in Mercosur / Martin Obaya -- The de-politicizing logic of European economic integration / Natalie Doyle.