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The Efferct Of Political Exchanges

In important respects, the regional context of the Western Hemisphere has changed dramatically in the past decade. Authoritarian rule has given way to democracy in
almost every Latin American country; societies wrenched by years of violent and costly civil wars, driven by Cold War ideological rivalries, have decided to settle their
differences with ballots rather than bullets; state-controlled, closed economies have been pried open, both by the distress of massive debt and the opportunity of new
markets. Today's world is marked by borders made porous by technological change, more fluid economic resources, and the continuous movement of people.

Hemispheric relations have also undergone a sea change toward more institutionalized cooperation. This has been manifest in many issues: economic cooperation as
embodied in NAFTA, MERCOSUR, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) process; political cooperation through multilateral diplomacy (for example, the
Ecuador-Peru conflict); peacekeeping operations (Central America, Haiti); and a more active Organization of American States, charged with defending democracy. Even
security cooperation has been shown in confidence-building measures among historical rivals in the Southern Cone and peacekeeping operations in Central America and
the Caribbean. Terms such as multilateralism, regionalism, consensus, and convergence pepper descriptions of hemispheric relations throughout the volumes reviewed
here. Most of these volumes must have been prompted in part by a shared belief in the positive potential of these changes.

Regionalism, moreover, means more than just free trade or military confidence-building measures; it refers to the hemispherewide convergence of values promoted by the
development of multilateral institutions, the development of a common community. The Summit of the Americas process best exemplifies this new regionalist impulse. The
three summits over less than ten years (Miami 1994, Santiago...