The participation of Uruguay in UNASUR: ideas, foreign policy and models of international insertion

Abstract

This article studies the Uruguayan participation in UNASUR from 2008 to August 2014 from the theoretical perspective that assigns a crucial role in foreign policy design to ideas, beliefs and images. Its purpose is to establish to which extent this influence of ideas affected the decisionmaking process of the Uruguayan government towards the emergence of the bloc and its subsequent performance as a forum for concerted and negotiated solutions to regional political crises.
In the first section it presents some determinant directions in the domestic debate over the Uruguayan position on South American regionalism. Next it discusses the contributions of scholars working at centres of diverse disciplinary profiles. The following section examines the process of Uruguayan membership in UNASUR ant the main arguments in the debate about it. The last section of this work analyses the performance of Uruguay inside the South American organization.