Over the Atlantic

Introduction

Paulina Astroza Suarez, Giuliana Laschi, Nahuel Oddone, and Mario Torres Jarrin

For so many years the EU and Latin America have tried to build a mature relationship. Diplomacy and paradiplomacy have played a key role in fostering dialogues, negotiations, and agreements at different levels of governance, from global to local. The EU and Latin America have developed privileged connections since the first Bi-regional Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1999, which established a strategic partnership. The conclusions of the summit pointed out strong historical, cultural, political, and economic bonds.¹ As a result, the two partners deepened their commitment to work together for consolidating the respect of human rights and democracy, regional integration, and rules-based multilateralism.

Diplomacy and paradiplomacy play both a crucial role in designing the relations between the two regions, on the world stage and for their bilateral agreements. The pandemic of COVID-19 had significantly increased the relevance of Paradiplomacy, on the global stage in general, and between European and Latin America regions. Recently, Alvarez and Oddone (2022) analyzed the preliminary impact of COVID-19 pandemic on paradiplomacy.² In addition, as Oddone has further explained in this volume, Covid-19 pandemic shaped international cooperation schemes among the regions.

There is no way to analyze the nature of diplomatic and paradiplomatic relations between the two regions, without a reference to the specific characteristics of their integration processes.

“The magnitude of the integrationist phenomenon has hidden a second trend during the initial years of the post-Cold War, which has not been less significant, the strengthening of the interior spaces of the national State, those that under the denomination of regions, autonomous communities, provinces or states constitute the subnational sphere” (Maira, 2006: 84).

In the study of regional integration processes, new importance has gained considering the dynamics of subnational actors. New forms of multilevel governance are thus emerging, revealing the structural link between subnational regionalism and the new supranational regionalism.

Inspired by the European experience, the early theories of integration focused on the motivations that encouraged national States to go through a process of regional integration, as well as the forms and schemes that this could adopt. Neofunctionalism has expanded the spectrum of analysis by considering societies as the result of competing interests that coexist through institutional arrangements, recognising top-down and bottom-up dynamics within the processes of regional integration. In this way, Neofunctionalism contributes to the understanding of how subnational governments put themselves in the dynamics of integration.

For this reason, while the decision to participate in a regional integration process comes exclusively from the power of the national State, subnational governments have soon concentrated their efforts on building different forms of influence, formal and informal, which – in some cases – has been channeled toward institutional structures (Martín López and Oddone, 2010). Therefore, governance would not be based on a strong and clearly defined nucleus of institutions based in a specific territory, but through political processes and activities originated by the integration between various fields of policy and at different levels of governance. The theoretical approach used to describe and analyze the European integration process was quickly transferred to other integration processes in Latin America, with particular emphasis on the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR), the Andean Community (CAN), and the Central American Integration System (SICA), where many research works discuss institutional isomorphism and the possibilities of adapting the European institutional framework to other regional contexts.

The governance approach has reinforced the interpretation that Central States no longer have a monopoly on global issues but instead share them with other actors, creating a more complex but less rigid and hierarchical system of relations. This system opens new opportunities and tensions among the different actors involved, and these tensions impact on diplomats and paradiplomats. As Sánchez Cano mention in his chapter in this book: “The job of (para)diplomats changes when “international affairs” become “global governance”. Modifications in terms of actors, competencies, scales, agendas, and functions in the framework of cooperative processes, occupy a central place in the theoretical reflection that correlates subnational governments and paradiplomacy.

This book consists of three main parts. The first discuss the institutionalization and normalization of paradiplomacy in some specific and well-documented case studies regarding the Latin America region. The second one refers to the relationship between paradiplomacy and cooperation in the context of international and regional relations. The third part analyzes Cities and Parliaments as international diplomatic actors.

Part I: the institutionalization and normalization of paradiplomacy in some specific and well-documented case studies regarding the Latin America region. Against conventional approaches that tend to minimize the importance of paradiplomacy, with Cornago (2010) we understand that “this reality is presently undergoing a process of legal and political normalization throughout the world and deserves greater attention from both diplomatic practitioners and experts”.

Normalization allows the selective incorporation into the diplomatic field of important innovations that are produced by the pluralization of global life, simply because they are -both for functional and normative reasons- too relevant to be ignored. But it simultaneously reaffirms the hierarchical structure of the diplomatic system (Cornago, 2010: 34).

Noé Cornago has extensively analyzed the normalization of paradiplomacy through four lenses: normalization as generalization; normalization as regionalization; normalization as reflective adaptation; and, finally, normalization as settlement of disputes (Cornago, 2010). In the first chapter, Cross-border paradiplomacy in Latin America: opportunities and challenges for the reopening of borders and the post Covid-19 recovery by Nahuel Oddone, the reader will recognize the normalization as regionalization. In the second chapter, The international linkage of Chilean regions as an example of paradiplomacy in a Unitary State by Paulina Astroza and Pablo Navarro Rosas, the reader will recognize the normalization as reflective adaptation. In the third chapter, Galician paradiplomacy (1981–2021): A general description and ten final notes by Celso Cancela Outeda, the reader will recognize the perspective of normalization as generalization.

The contributions presented in the Part II: Paradiplomacy and cooperation, between international and regional relations, offer different approaches to study the actorness of local and regional authorities in International Relations. In Link between the localization of SDGs and territorial development: an environmental paradiplomacy-based approach by Mariano Alvarez, and Paradiplomacy, “actorness”, and the global agendas by Javier Sánchez Cano, the authors reflect on the linkages between paradiplomacy and the global agendas. The first author M. Alvarez presents a very practical perspective aligned with the 2030 Agenda and the localization of SDGS. The second author, J. Sánchez, presents a theoretical perspective based on the concept of actorness, and its evolution through a diachronic analysis.

The fact that the literature on actorness has focused on the study of the performance of the European Union and some other international organizations, especially within the United Nations System, represents a challenge for the use of the actorness to define other international actors. In the case of non-central governments, the author invites to consider their distinctive characteristics, as well as historical bonds, to understand their angles when trying to be more present on the international arena. This approach has been applied to non-central governments (Luna Pont and Oddone, 2020) highlighting that self-perception and internal cohesion affect the autonomous capacity of the unit to behave actively and deliberately in relation to other actors in the international system.³ These characteristics could also help to understand the experience of Chinese paradiplomatic actors.

In Paradiplomacy and cooperation in the pandemic era: A review from China in Latin America by Florencia Rubiolo and Gonzalo Fiore Viani, the authors analyze the main actions and practices implemented by China in Latin America from a paradiplomatic perspective in the context of the pandemic and the dynamics of health cooperation at the subnational level.

The Part III: Beyond some examples of traditional state diplomacy: Cities and Parliaments as international diplomatic actors, includes several experiences extremely related with the democratization of foreign policy by considering the needs and interests of the different levels within the State and the different Powers involved. Stéphane Paquin emphasizes that one can only speak of paradiplomacy when the mandate is granted to official representatives by a sub-state government to negotiate with international actors (Paquin, 2004). This interpretation is also legitim for Parliamentary diplomacy. Parliaments today are more than deliberative institutions. They have become relevant world actors by conducting parallel diplomatic relations, or what the literature refers to as “parliamentary diplomacy”.⁴ In Parliamentary diplomacy in practice: the role of the European Parliament delegations in the modernization of the Global Agreement between the European Union and Mexico, Mónica Velasco Pufleau highlights the European Parliament’s diplomacy efforts to shape EU’s external relations since the Treaties of Rome.

Finally, Mario Torres Jarrín analyzes paradiplomacy from the point of view of a Smart city in City diplomacy. Theory and practice of paradiplomacy: smart city Sweden case. This experience is extremely interesting because, as Mursitama and Lee reflected in 2018, there is a specific framework of smart city diplomacy. The main argue of these Indonesian authors is that smart cities need to build a smart diplomacy at the subnational level, and they have proposed a new and specific framework for smart city diplomacy as one way to integrate information technology, public policy and international relations which will be the main contribution to literature and practice.⁵