While the overall goal of EU’s relationship to Latin America is to promote social cohesion and regional integration, its interlocutor varies according to policy areas. Broader political dialogue and human rights interactions take place on a region-region level, especially in the framework of EU-CELAC summits. Negotiations and implementation of trade agreements, however, connect to individual countries in the region and rarely take on regional forms.
This paper argues that such ‘fluid and pragmatic’ approach has allowed for greater responsiveness thanks to its implicit policy flexibility yet it has also had the unintended effect of undermining the legitimacy of the interregional dialogues as inconsistencies across the various interactions have produced unintelligible and fragmented legitimation discourses. As such, the puzzle this paper seeks to unpack, by way of discourse analysis of the EU's fluid interactions with LAC on trade and political dialogue, is under which conditions the EU's quest for greater interregional efficiency can lead to chronically fragmented legitimation mechanisms of regionalism itself.
