There is a widespread agreement that the regional level of global politics has become more important. There is also recognition that Latin America has been an important region for thinking about regionalism and that Mercosur represents one of the major regionalist schemes of the recent past. Most literature, however, concentrates on questions of economic integration and on the period of Mercosur's greatest success and development, namely the 1990s. The origins of Mercosur and the nature of the rapprochement between Brazil and Argentina on which Mercosur was built have been neglected. It is this gap that this well-researched and well-written book seeks to fill – and succeeds in filling. It is divided into two parts, the first concentrating on the historical analysis, the second on theoretical issues. The historical account gives a crisp overview of the history of relations between Brazil and Argentina and of the complex mixture of conflict and cooperation that characterised their relations during the twentieth century. Gian Luca Gardini highlights the coincidence of factors that came together in the late 1970s to produce a shift in the relationship – although he is doubtful that any one factor can be seen as producing a breakthrough (for example the Tripartite Agreement of 1979 that ended the dispute over the Itaipú dam). Here one might note that the discussion of when things really began to change is slightly hampered by the absence of any clear conceptual discussion of what rapprochement might involve in a general sense and how it might be conceptually related to various understandings of integration. The most impressive and important core of the historical analysis covers what the author calls the ‘seminal period’ from 1983 to 1985, and this is based on an extensive and extremely informative set of interviews with most of the main players. The greater impetus came from Argentina and the driving logics were not economic but political, although rather different in the two countries. The final chapter in part I examines the period from 1986 to 1991, including the sectoral economic agreements concluded under the worsening economic conditions of the late 1980s and then the shift in the Collor/Menem period towards Mercosur based on the parallel moves to economic liberalisation in the two countries. This section also looks briefly, but very usefully, at the consolidation of the stabilisation of the nuclear relationship in the 1990 agreements.

Part II looks to question those strongly neo-Kantian accounts that stress the link between democracy and regionalisation. For this author such accounts give rise to expectations about a proactive role for Congress in the promotion of integration, and also an important role for business. Chapter 4 provides interesting material on the role of congress in the two countries, but essentially underscores the top-down, executive-led character of the process. The examination of the role of business points in a broadly similar direction. ‘On the one hand, the legislatures had a minor impact on the integrationist plan conceived and implemented by the executives. On the other, business, which was to be the chief executor of integration in the government's plans, proved to be more of an obstacle that an asset’ (p. 147). In order to sustain the link between democratisation and regionalisation, Gardini then develops the idea of democracy as a ‘foundational idea of integration’, relating his arguments to cognitive theories of international relations, to social constructivism and to the literature on ideas and foreign policy. This chapter is full of insightful arguments and suggestive lines of analysis. The difficulties here are, first, that there is rather too much going on theoretically, and it would have been more helpful to have had a single set of core theoretical claims; and second, that these claims come at the end of the book, calling into question the division of this study into a prior historical section and then a more political and theoretical section. In retrospect it is frustrating to have the historical account without knowing exactly where the overall argument is going to lead. Perhaps as a result, some of the important linkages between democracy and regionalisation may also have fallen between the two sections. Thus in the historical section we do learn of the extent to which democracy is viewed by the protagonists as a common identity and shared destiny (p. 44), and that, especially for Argentina, it is a crucial part of how Alfonsín and Caputo sought to change the image of their country after the disasters of the recent past. We are also told of the degree to which external clashes would be likely to raise nationalist reactions within Argentinian society. But these links between the very fragility of democratisation and regional pacification are not brought out in the theoretical section, challenging, as they do, the common assumption in international relations studies that, while democracy is associated with peace, democratisation processes are associated with greater conflict rather than with rapprochement between strategic competitors and the consolidation of regional peace.