In this paper Brazil's and China's regional integration/cooperation strategies are compared. Brazil and China are two rising powers on the global arena with a high impact on their respective regions. The view taken in the analysis is not that regional integration is important in itself, instead, the analysis explains the kind of regionalism promoted by Brazil and China in their respective roles in shaping and directing regional integration/cooperation. Through the comparative analysis of their role in regional integration, we will be able to understand not only their international political strategies of emphasizing on regionalism and South-South relations but also the strategies of national development of the two states as well as their aim of changing the balance of power in the world system and gaining a more prominent position on the world stage in the current era of globalization and transnational capitalism. Our comparative analysis of the two countries' international political strategies and the particular weight given to regionalism and South-South relations highlights the significance of the wider international context, own development situations as well as the patterns of international economic insertion for the chosen strategies. The paper starts out with an analysis of regional integration in Latin America, and Brazil's strategies are followed by an analysis of regional integration in East Asia and China's strategies. The conclusion sums up the main similarities and differences between the two countries and the two regions.

Regional integration in Latin America did not emerge as a significant issue until the 1950s, and at this point the aims of regional integration were purely of an economic character and with the emphasis on free trade. In 1960, Latin American Free Trade Agreement (LAFTA) was established between Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Later Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela joined. LAFTA was inspired by ideas developed in the Economic Commission for Latin America that saw broader regional markets provided by regional free trade as a way to promote national industrialization, and thus economic development, in participant countries (Christensen, 2007a, p. 3). At the outset, there was very little mutual trade between the member countries due to the low degree of economic complementation.

Apart from LAFTA, two other regional integration initiatives came into being in the 1960s, namely the Central American Common Market (CACM) in 1960 and the Andes Pact in 1969. Economic interdependence was also quite low at the outset in both of these cases (Mattli, 1999, pp. 148-152). The highest degree of mutual trade was found between the most industrially developed South American neighboring countries of LAFTA, namely, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Their mutual trade reached a peak of 12.2% in 1953 (Furtado, 1972, p. 197), but then fell back. Thus, the initiative of regional integration in the case of LAFTA was actually taken at a time of falling regional economic interdependence, something that goes against the expectations of dominant theories of regional integration such as neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism.

In the analysis of Latin American regional integration/cooperation, the theoretical perspective that seems most useful is a combination of intergovernmentalism with its emphasis on changing preferences of member states, along with what Andrew Hurrell (1995, pp. 46-58) calls systemic theories of regional integration. The most useful thing here is a combination of neo-realism and theories that emphasize the importance of international market pressures found in literature on economic interdependence and globalization.

International Relations Journal, International Political Strategies, Regional Integration, Latin American Free Trade Agreement, LAFTA, Central American Common Market, CACM, Political Instability, Economic Dependence, Negotiation Capacity, Economic Relations, Mutual Trade, Mercosurs System.