Conceptualising the ALBA-TCP: Third Generation Regionalism and Political Economy

The paper employs an historical approach to cooperation and integration in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in order to argue that to date the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) is the only integration project under construction in Our America that not only actively integrates the entire LAC, but also is the most comprehensive, sophisticated and dynamic regionalism in the area. I draw on Frederik Söderbaum and Luk van Langenhove’s notion of ‘generations’ of regionalisms, identifying the import substitution influenced initiatives, the neoliberal ‘open regionalisms’, and the post-neoliberal and counter-imperialist projects launched over the past decade, especially the ALBA-TCP. By explicitly associating generations of regionalisms with particular political economic models, I emphasise politics and ideologies in the analysis, which are absent in Söderbaum and van Langenhove’s classification. The politics, institutionalisation and organisational structure of the ALBA-TCP as a third generation regionalism and counter-globalisation project are discussed.