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

This is an in-person event.

Tuesday, 17 June 2025 from 11.00 until 12.30.

This presentation examines the strategic role of the automotive industry in regional integration processes in Latin America. Adopting a critical international political economy perspective, it argues that transnational capital has shaped a form of automotive regionalism, where global value chains are functionally fragmented yet territorially concentrated in peripheral spaces. In this context, the automotive industry —historically associated with import-substitution industrialisation and national development strategies— emerges as a key vector of regional articulation. It embodies the structural tensions between the expansive logic of global capital and the political-institutional constraints of nation-states. A comparative analysis of Mercosur and US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) critically examines the scope, contradictions, and limits of productive integration driven by transnational corporations in a context of economic dependency.

Keywords: Automotive industry; capitalism; Latin America; Mercosur; regional integration; regionalism, USMCA

Speaker:

Jorge Damián Rodríguez Díaz is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of the Republic (Uruguay) and a researcher at the international studies programme. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the Complutense University of Madrid, a master’s degree in political science from the University of Salamanca, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of the Republic (Uruguay). His work focuses on international political economy, with a particular emphasis on regionalism, regional integration, and the role of transnational capital in Latin America. He has participated in international conferences and published in academic journals, book chapters, and working papers, contributing to the debates from a neo-Gramscian perspective in International Relations, offering a critical analysis of the region's economic and political dynamics.

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