Integrating the subject: narratives of emancipation in regionalism

This article seeks to tease out how different regional organizations understand the subject and how that subject frames the process of integration. It does so in two steps. The first part of the article argues that the notion of emancipation is an interesting lens through which to approach this question in a way that allows for a meaningful and nuanced comparison of radically different projects of regional integration. Emancipation, at the highest level of abstraction, is concerned with the capacity of (public) power to dominate the subject in the ways in which she understands or realizes herself. The regional integration projects that have emerged as ways of overcoming quite specific and historically rooted state limitations, have a selective vision of who the subject is. This selective vision needs to be appreciated in order to understand the organization and process of integration. The second part of the article looks at the European Union, the African Union and Mercosur through this lens and traces different visions of emancipation and of the relationship between the subject, state and regional integration.