North American Regionalism problematizes “North America” as an important region in its own right, breaking with the area-studies convention that divides the Global North and Global South portions of the Western Hemisphere at the US-Mexican border. By cutting across this division, the theoretically sophisticated essays in this volume yield new insights about politics, society, and the economy of North America, opening dialogues with the New Regionalism approach and the literature on comparative regional studies. Drawing on a six-year interdisciplinary collaboration among leading scholars from Canadian, Mexican, US, and European universities, the book brings North America back into International Relations’ study of regions and regionalism. The book includes robust theoretical and empirical engagement with issues of trade, migration, security, energy and climate, and the rise of China.

'The heart of Professor Preusse's book deals with the two main integration agreements in the Americas, NAFTA and MERCOSUR, and the incipient FTAA. The handling of these three cases is masterful, replete with description, data, theoretical analysis, and opinion . . . His book is a most worthwhile and stimulating read, certainly for those interested in Western Hemisphere developments.' - From the foreword by Sidney Weintraub This book provides a broad quantitative analysis of the new facets of regionalism in the Americas. In particular, major aspects of the New American Regionalism are discussed in terms of two basic notions: the genuine political character of economic integration schemes, and the profound inter-connectedness of the American regions with the global economy.

Was the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) designed as a definitive trade agreement, or as a stepping stone? This book reviews NAFTA's performances on trade, investment, intellectual property rights, dispute-settlement, as well as environmental and labor side-agreements within a theoretical construct.

"Can North America survive as a region in light of the political turbulence provoked by the global economic crisis? Or have regional integration and collaboration reached a plateau beyond which disintegration is likely? In North America in Question, leading analysts from Canada, the United States, and Mexico provide theoretically innovative and rich empirical reflections on current challenges sweeping the continent and on the faltering political support for North American regionalism.

Empirically rich with highly detailed case studies on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), this comprehensive volume studies the relationship between regionalism and state behavior. The traditional pattern of past studies of regionalism and regional integration has been to understand how state strategies molded the dynamics of an integration process. This study examines the impact of regionalism on the policy preferences of member states. This volume offers three theoretical contributions: an empirical test of the convergence hypothesis studies of institutions and their impact on domestic politics an examination of foreign policy preferences and the neo-functionalist concept of 'spill-over' Recommended reading for students of regionalism, international political economy, international trade, foreign policy and North American studies.

Twenty years after NAFTA, the consensus seems to be that the regional project in North America is dead. The trade agreement was never followed up by new institutions that might cement a more ambitious regional community. The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), launched with some fanfare in 2005, was quietly discontinued in 2009. And new cooperative ventures like the US‐Canada Beyond the Border talks and the US‐Mexico Merida Initiative suggest that the three governments have reverted to the familiar, pre‐NAFTA pattern of informal, incremental bilateralism. One could argue, however, that NAFTA itself has been buried, and yet the region somehow lives on, albeit in a form very different from regional integration in other parts of the world. A diverse group of contributors, from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with experience in academia, government service, think tanks and the private sector bring to bear a sophisticated and much needed examination of regional governance in North America, its historical origins, its connection to the regional distribution of power and the respective governments’ domestic institutions, and the variance of its forms and function across different issue areas. The editors begin by surveying the literature on North American regional politics, matching up developments there with parallel debates and controversies in the broader literatures on comparative regional integration and international policy coordination more generally. Six contributors later explore the mechanisms of policy coordination in specific issue-areas, each with an emphasis on a particular set of actors, and with its own way of characterizing the relevant political and diplomatic dynamics. Chapters on the political context for regional policy coordination follow leading to concluding remarks on the future of North America. At a time when scholarly interest in North America seems to be waning, even while important and interesting political and economic developments are taking place, this volume will reinvigorate the study of North America as a region, to better understand its past, present and future.