Building autonomy: a shared goal between Latin America and Europe

In the face of great international uncertainty as the year 2025 begins, the quest for autonomy is at the centre of public debate in the European Union (EU) and has created, since the Cold War, a doctrine in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). From different angles and priorities, an autonomist foreign policy is a shared objective between the two regions that could foster a true strategic partnership.

Donald Trump's second term in office, that started on 20 January 2025, will undoubtedly represent a major incentive for autonomy, whether strategic or not, in Latin America and Europe. Shortly before the change of government in the United States, both regions marked a historic milestone by signing, on 6 December 2024, the association agreement between the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the EU, concluding a quarter of a century of negotiation. The future free trade area will be the largest in the world, comprising 700 million people and a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 21,000 billion dollars. In doing so, the EU and Mercosur members (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay and, in the future, Bolivia) pre-empted further protectionism and possible trade wars with the United States, confirming their commitment to globalisation.

The EU-Mercosur agreement could be a first step towards inter-regional autonomy based on integration and cooperation strategies for each region, the diversification of economic partners and a multilateral vocation. It reflects the search for foreign policies with greater independence from China or the United States, in an increasingly illiberal international context marked by Realist narratives of rivalry between states, the rise of nationalism and populist or authoritarian governments. Autonomy in foreign policy represents an important debate in both regions, albeit from different narratives and without any kind of connection.

The idea of autonomy first emerged in Argentina and Brazil and represents one of the great Latin American contributions to International Relations (Briceño and Simonoff, 2017). In the midst of the Cold War, the concept was developed by the Argentine Carlos Puig (1980) and the Brazilian Hélio Jaguaribe to identify decision-making spaces and the capacity to implement foreign policies on the margins or in the midst of the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. From the periphery of the Global South (Míguez, 2022), the Latin American autonomist debate focused on the development opportunities offered by a certain independence between ideological blocs. A key tool for achieving autonomy was cooperation and integration as a platform for a less asymmetrical international insertion. Since then, regionalism in its different forms has been part of the autonomy debate. Recently, the concept of "active non-alignment" (Fortín, Heine and Ominami, 2021) or "liquid autonomy" (Actis and Malacalza, 2021) renewed the autonomy debate. The other side of the coin is acquiescence (Russell and Tokatlian 2013), a strategy chosen, for example, by Mexico when it entered into a free trade agreement with the US and Canada in 1994.

In the EU, the debate is recent, less academic and more imminent in the face of the Russian threat following the invasion of Ukraine, a reduced US role in NATO and the need to strengthen its security and defence system or its autonomy in technological, energy or industrial policy. Strategic autonomy generated a large number of academic publications (Beaucille, Franke/Vam, Miró, among others) and was embodied in two major foreign policy documents: the 2016 Global Strategy and the 2022 Strategic Compass. Since then, the EU has produced a series of documents to strengthen its independence in various sectors.

 Table 1: The international, regional and interregional context for autonomy

Source: created by the author.

LAC from the Global South and the EU as part of the West build autonomy by strengthening regionalism and integration. Latin America and the Caribbean have intensified their regional dialogue through CELAC, which also serves as a counterpart to the EU and China. The EU has strengthened its security and defence policy, among others through the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund (EDF). It also applies (open) strategic autonomy to other policies.

LAC and the EU agree on the pursuit of greater independence, although they continue to have institutional ties with Washington: the EU through NATO and the Transatlantic Summits, and LAC in the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Summits of the Americas. Both also prefer a close and cordial relationship with China, or at least a policy of non-confrontation. The EU has a strategic relationship with Beijing, China is its second largest trading partner and was described as a 'systemic partner and rival' by the President of the European Commission. LAC has intensified its economic relations with China, which for Argentina, Chile or Brazil would be its main partner, but also seeks to maintain a balance between Washington and Beijing.

Figure 1: Autonomy and its strategies

One result of the mutual search for independent decision-making and policy spaces was the signing of the agreement with Mercosur, another is the collective Summits between CELAC and the EU whose next edition will be held in 2025 in Bogotá. Both partners could build an inter-regional autonomy where the EU, motivated by its security concerns and LAC, focused on the issue of development, would choose to strengthen their regional identities and international actorness to face a multipolar world where the EU from the North and LAC from the South would be vulnerable links if they fail to join forces with other like-minded partners. It is worth remembering that there are no other two regions like LAC and the EU free of armed conflict that share multilateralism, regionalism and continue to prefer Liberalism over Realism. In a less open world scenario, autonomy offers a great opportunity for both sides to connect their debates and initiate a dialogue on this issue.

References:

Actis, Esteban y Malacalza, Bernabé (2021), “Las políticas exteriores de América Latina en tiempos de autonomía liquida”, Nueva Sociedad 291 (accesible en: https://nuso.org/articulo/las-politicas-exteriores-de-america-latina-en…)

Álvarez, Anuschka y Gratius, Susanne (2024), “Divergencias y convergencias de los debates autonomistas en América Latina y la UE”, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals 136: 63-88. 

Beaucillon, Charlotte (2023), “Strategic Autonomy: A New Identity for the EU as a Global Actor”,. European Papers/European Forum, 8:2: 417-428.

Briceño Ruiz, José y Simonoff, Alejandro (2017), «La Escuela de la Autonomía, América Latina y la Teoría de las Relaciones Internacionales». Estudios Internacionales 49(186): 39-89.

Fortín, Carlos; Heine, Jorge y Ominami, Carlos (2021), El no alineamiento activo y América Latina: Una doctrina para el nuevo siglo. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Catalonia.

Franke, Ulrike y Varma, Tara (2019), “Independence Play: Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy”, Flash Scorecard, Londres: ECFR (accesible en: https://
ecfr.eu/special/independence_play_europes_pursuit_of_strategic_autonomy/)

Míguez, María Cecilia (2022), “The concept of autonomy as an epistemic foundation? Many paths, many turns”, en: Acharya, Amitav; Deciancio, Melisa y Tussie, Diana (eds.) Latin America in Global International Relations, Nueva York y Londres: Routledge, p. 220-234.

Miró, Joan (2023), “Responding to the global disorder: the EU’s quest for open strategic Autonomy”,. Global Society 37(3): 315-335.

Puig, Juan Carlos (1980), Doctrinas internacionales y autonomía latinoamericana. Caracas: IAE, Universidad Simón Bolívar, 1980.

Russell, Roberto y Tokatlian, Juan Gabriel (2013), “América Latina y su gran estrategia: entre la aquiescencia y la autonomía”, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, 104: 8-24.
 

(The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the EU-LAC Foundation).