Automotive Regionalism and Transnational Capitalism: Engines of Latin American Regional Integration

Abstract

This working paper examines the strategic role of the automotive industry in regional integration processes in Latin America from a critical international political economy perspective. It proposes the concept of automotive regionalism to account for a specific form of regional integration shaped by the strategies of transnational capital and mediated by state structures in peripheral economies. Rather than approaching the automotive industry as a sectoral case within broader integration processes, the paper conceptualizes it as a vector through which regional integration is materially organized, politically stabilised, and ideologically legitimised. Historically associated with import-substitution industrialisation and national development strategies, the automotive industry has been rearticulated under conditions of neoliberal globalization as a relevant axis of regional 
articulation. However, rather than generating trajectories of autonomous development, this reconfiguration has reinforced forms of structural dependency. Through a comparative analysis of Mercosur and the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), the paper argues that these schemes do not constitute alternative stages of a linear integration trajectory, but rather differentiated configurations of automotive regionalism, shaped by specific state-capital relations and transnational corporate strategies, which converge in the reproduction of dependent forms of regional integration.