Resilience to crisis and resistance to change: a comparative analysis of the determinants of crisis outcomes in Latin American regional organisations
| Author | Giovanni Agostinis,Detlef Nolte |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211067366 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211067366
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(1) 117 –143
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178211067366
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Resilience to crisis and
resistance to change: a
comparative analysis of
the determinants of crisis
outcomes in Latin American
regional organisations
Giovanni Agostinis
Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy
Detlef Nolte
German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA – Hamburg), Germany
Abstract
Latin American regionalism displays a long history of crises, which have affected almost all
regional organisations (ROs) across different waves of regionalism. The article conducts the first
comparative analysis of the outcomes of crises in Latin American ROs across time, tackling the
following questions: What have been the outcomes of the crises faced by Latin American ROs?
Under what conditions does a crisis result in the survival or breakdown of the affected RO in
Latin America? We adopt a multi-method approach that combines QCA with process tracing to
identify the causal pathways to the survival or breakdown of ROs across a universe of eight crises.
The findings show that Latin American ROs have been resilient to crises, which resulted in RO
survival in seven cases out of eight. The QCA reveals how the distributive nature of interstate
conflicts and the availability of majority voting are both sufficient conditions for Latin American
ROs to survive a crisis. Analysis of the outlier case of UNASUR shows that normative conflicts
that take place in the absence of majority voting constitute a ‘perfect storm’ configuration that
can lead to RO breakdown. The findings also show that Latin America ROs’ tendency to survive
crises is associated with the preservation of the status quo in terms of institutional design, which
in some cases is achieved through the temporary flexibilisation of existing rules. Differently from
Corresponding author:
Giovanni Agostinis, Assistant Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna,
Via Zamboni, 33, Bologna BO, 40126, Italy.
Email: gagostinis@uc.cl
1067366IRE0010.1177/00471178211067366International RelationsAgostinis and Nolte
research-article2021
Article
118 International Relations 37(1)
the case of the EU, then, the crises of Latin American ROs have not led to the deepening of
regional integration, but rather to institutional inertia.
Keywords
comparative regionalism, crises of IGOs, Latin America, regional organisations
Introduction
All across the world, regional organisations (hereafter ROs) have repeatedly faced crises.
This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed in scholarly literature. The International
Relations (IR) scholarship on intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) has delivered
large-N analyses of the determinants of IGO death1 and vitality2 across extended time
periods, but it has not addressed the logics and outcomes of RO crises. The comparative
regionalism literature has analysed the impact of exogenous economic and financial cri-
ses on regionalism’s performance and legitimacy across different regions,3 but it has
largely overlooked the endogenous logics of RO crises. On the other hand, the scholar-
ship on European integration has extensively dealt with the endogenous logics of the
crises of EU institutions, gaining further prominence in the past few years due to
European integration’s multidimensional crisis.4 However, the insights generated by EU
studies have struggled to travel outside Europe.
This article addresses this gap in the literature by focusing on Latin America. Latin
American regionalism displays a long history of crises, which have affected almost
all ROs across different waves of regionalism.5 The literature emphasised the resilience
of regionalism in Latin America, showing how crises have traditionally been followed
by the reactivation of regional cooperation/integration.6 However, the recent breakdown
of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) challenges the claim that Latin
American ROs are resilient to crises. We investigate this key dimension of Latin
American regionalism by conducting the first comparative analysis of the crises of Latin
American ROs across time, tackling the following questions: What have been the out-
comes of the crises faced by Latin American ROs? Under what conditions does a crisis
result in the survival or breakdown of the affected RO in Latin America? We construct
our own definition of an RO crisis, which allows us to identify a universe of eight crises
in the history of Latin American regionalism. Drawing from the IR literature on IGO
death/vitality, from comparative regionalism, and from EU studies on disintegration, we
argue that the outcome of an RO crisis – which we operationalise in a binary fashion as
survival versus breakdown – can be determined by three endogenous conditions: (i) the
nature of the interstate conflict (distributive or normative); (ii) the availability of majority
voting; and (iii) the presence of regional leadership in support of the RO. We formulate
a set of hypotheses related to the impact of these conditions on the survival/breakdown
of an RO in crisis, which we test through a multi-method approach that combines a quali-
tative comparative analysis (QCA) with a process tracing analysis (PTA).
Our first finding is that Latin American ROs have indeed been resilient to crises. All
the crises that we analysed resulted in RO survival, with the sole exception of UNASUR’s
breakdown. This confirms the resilience of Latin American regionalism identified by the
literature, while begging the question as to what factors explain Latin American ROs’
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