A Survival Technique for the 21st Century: Regional Integration in Central America

This working paper discusses the Central American regional Integration system (SICA) that tries to unite all Central American states into one economic and political union. SICA is one of the more advanced regional integration systems in world, and yet the academic literature on regional integration and regionalism tends to ignore it. The first attempts to integrate Central America date back to the immediate aftermath of the independence from Spain in the beginning of the 19th century and they have been evolving ever since. Arguments of a shared history, culture and language, combating shared problems as well as the benefits of economies of scale and the added value of a single Central American voice in international diplomatic forums pushed the governments of the more than 50 million Central Americans citizens closer and closer together. But due to various limitations to the actual (institutional) framework, we can still not speak of a true ‘regionalization’ of the Central American Isthmus. These issues and more will be dealt with in this working paper.