Latin America – forgotten by the EU?

By Andrew Beatty

Date: 14/07/05

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the external relations commissioner, is to visit Uruguay and Brazil next month to try to revive relations with the two countries. Later this year the European Commission will present proposals aimed at boosting ties with Latin America.

Ahead of a major EU-Latin America summit that will take place next year in Vienna, it is already clear that, in the best traditions of Commission-speak, the proposals will be about "consolidating and reinforcing relations".

Preparations are still in their initial stages, with a final communication expected in October or November.

But there are grounds for believing that EU-Latin American relations are already dead in the water.

Latin America barely features on today's EU agenda. Europe is waking up to the emergence of Asia, in particular China. The UK presidency of the EU is preparing summits with China, India and Mediterranean countries, is pushing Africa up the agenda and taking an active part in the Middle East peace process which is entering a new phase.

Following a boom in the 1990s, which saw the EU develop ties on a sub-regional and national level with Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay), Central America, Mexico and Chile, there is little doubt that EU-Latin American relations have slowed.

A proposed trade agreement with Mercosur has still not been completed, although Ferrero-Waldner will try to rectify this during her August trip to Brazil and Uruguay.

"Latin America is at the bottom of the bottom," says Erika Ruiz Sandoval of the Barcelona-based Observatory of European Foreign Policy.

This despite Latin America becoming, on the whole, progressively more democratic and prosperous in the past decade. According to the World Bank, the region now has the highest gross national income, highest life expectance at birth and lowest under-five mortality rates of any developing region in the world.

Although the EU says it wants to develop relations in the area of politics, it was in the area of trade that relations developed most during the 1990s.

According to the European Commission's own statistics, in 1990-2002 trade between the EU and Latin America doubled.

"There is a big emphasis on [Europe] being different from the United States, that there is political dialogue and co-operation and not just trade. But the reality is that it is mostly about trade," says Ruiz Sandoval. "The problem with the EU is that there is a big gap between discourse and reality."

She says the political slowdown has been caused by the EU's approach to the region.

At Rio de Janeiro in June 1999, the EU launched what has been termed a 'bi-regional' meeting with all Latin American and Caribbean countries.

At 20.4 million square kilometres, the region, which stretches from Argentina to Cuba, is too heterogeneous to deal with in one framework.

"Putting them all in the same basket does not allow this idea of a strategic partnership to go very far," says Ruiz Sandoval.

Although the internal disparities in wealth and power within South American countries are great, so are the disparities between the different countries.

The contrast between Brazil, which is striving for a place on the United Nations' Security Council, and Bolivia, which has endured months of violent protests, or Colombia, as it continues to struggle with insurgencies, is clear.

Efforts to close this double disparity, between and within states, have so far amounted to little.

That last year's EU-Latin America and Caribbean summit sought to promote social solidarity along a largely EU model, is intriguing, but the EU model is not something that can be replicated without massive economic development and substantial EU financial assistance.

Ruiz Sandoval believes the EU should first address the problem of trying to deal with such vastly different countries in one go.

"I would like to see the Commission commit itself to a big list of objectives, a recognition of where we are and where we need to go," she says, and, most of all, "to recognise that it is a heterogeneous region".

But even if the EU's approach changes, for the foreseeable future, Latin America is unlikely to reach the top of the EU's agenda.

Analysis feature on the relations of the European Union with Latin America. Author suggests that the continent features very low on the external relations agenda of the EU.

European Commission: DG External Relations: Regions: Latin America http://www.eeas.europa.eu/la/index_en.htm

---