Latin American Reflections on Integration Processes: from Theory of Peripheral Capitalism to “Sudamexit”

Integration processes in Latin America and Caribbean basin have been traditionally provoking strong research interest. Over the past decades, Latin American integration has tested plethora of institutional designs, ranging from relatively uniform subregional trade blocs - CACM, LAFTA, etc. to multifunctional partnerships with an identity-forming component, like Unasur or CELAC. This paper is an attempt to show how the Latin American academic community itself analyzes the integration in the “domestic” region. Forming the literature review, the authors, firstly, show how Latin American integrationism has transformed with the successive change of the phases of the “old”, “open” and “post-liberal” regionalism. Despite the fact that the types of integration in each of the periods differ significantly, scientists approach them in quite a similar way. They have been engineering the region socially and have been using such basic concepts as globalización , soberanía and desarrollo . The theory and practice of Latin American integration has always been closely intertwined. Secondly, the authors distinguish three today’s Latin American “big discourses” about integration - political-economic, geopolitical and state-centered. Each of these discourses takes into account the internal and external conditions that led to the post-liberal phase of integration. Third, expert forecasts about the prospects of regional associations against the background of the crisis tendencies of recent years are presented in this paper. Latin American experts agree on the fact that regional integration has entered the new phase, the most important features of which are the globalization slowing down, the complication of inter-American relations due to the “Trump factor”, the decline of left-progressist forces in the region.