Governance after Financial Crisis: South American Perspectives on the Reformulation of Regionalism

With the recent Ž nancial crises in Asia, Russia and Brazil, the resurgence of debate on the ‘management’ of globalisation has thrown into doubt a number of the ‘certainties’ which policy makers constructed to deal with the ‘uncertainties’ of a post-Cold War, globalising world order. These ‘certainties’ centred around the dominance of the ‘Washington Consensus’, the euphoria of ‘globalisation ’ and the heralding of an inexorable march towards a truly ‘global’ economy, and the notion of the ‘information age’ and the ‘digital revolution’ which eliminated cumbersome national boundaries and ‘shrunk’ the world into something approximating a ‘global village’. Academic and policy debate, bored with the monotony (and inaccuracy) of this ‘hyper-globalisation ’ discourse and, perhaps, with contesting yet again the alleged disappearance of the states, has turned of late towards a ‘restructuring’ agenda: restructuring of, for example, the Ž nancial architecture, the regulatory role of the national state, global markets, multilateral institutions and, crucially, the conceptual foundations of our understanding of international political economy (IPE). Neoclassical economists’ stubborn refusal to treat social and political variables as anything other than exogenous to the mainstream of market activity has been challenged by a growing intellectual preoccupation among international political economists (and other social scientists) with the normative connotations of the particular conŽ guration of economic and political power implied by the term ‘globalisation ’. This emerging normative agenda found particular expression in responses to the ‘crises of market fundamentalism’ occasioned by the Ž nancial turbulence of 1997–9. The ‘no-alternative’ rhetoric of globalisation appears to have given way to a more nuanced understanding of processes of global change and, moreover, of the sociopolitica l consequences of the ‘commodiŽ cation’ of economic and social relations. Most importantly, the Ž nancial crises propelled a renewed emphasis on the agency of state and non-state actors in directing, managing, perhaps mitigating the impact of the speciŽ c types of global economic activity that dominated the 1990s. In short, there appears to be underway a