Crisis-induced agenda setting in the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR)
Abstract
UNASUR was born in 2008 out of a series of crises, but none of them had much to do with the
financial crisis evoked in this volume. Hence, at first sight, UNASUR does not easily fit in the
framework sketched in the introduction. There is, prior to 2008, a dynamics of summits, with a
dominant player, Brazil, who takes the lead when the region has to cope with a crisis situation.
In a way, hypothesis 1 presented in the introduction can be considered validated by UNASUR.
The second and third ones are much more difficult to test, considering that UNASUR is a
nascent integration process when the financial crisis erupted in 2008...