Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp.

78–92, 2016

Institutional Contestation: Colombia

in the Pacific Alliance
DANIEL FLEMES
German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Germany

RAFAEL CASTRO
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia

Emerging powers have tried to build functional regional power bases

in their respective spheres of influence to gain support for their leader-
ship projects and representative capacities on the global stage. This has
caused diverse contestational responses by secondary powers in differ-
ent regional orders. In this context, we analyse the shift of Colombia’s
contestation approach towards the Brazilian leadership claim in South
America. With the arrival of President Santos, Colombia turned from col-
lateral hard balancing against Brazil to institutional contestation through
the Pacific Alliance. Besides furnishing evidence of the broader Colom-
bian soft-balancing strategy in other policy areas, the article explores and
balances the domestic, structural and behavioural drivers of the strate-
gic turn to institutional contestation through the Pacific Alliance without
neglecting the economic and political motives of Colombia’s engagement
in the pro-market alliance.

Keywords: Brazil, collateral hard balancing, Colombia, foreign policy

strategies, institutional contestation, Pacific Alliance.

Since the end of Cold War, there has been increasing discussion of the future features of
an increasingly multipolar world. A great deal of attention has been paid to the emerging
powers and the strategies they are using in their respective spheres of influence to obtain
acceptance of their leadership claims and their representative capacities at the global
level. While new powers like Brazil and the other states from the Brazil, Russia, India,
China and South Africa coalition (BRICS) have gained acceptance at the global level,
they often face regional contestation. As no state considers itself a pure follower of
another state, each secondary regional power generally tends to project different types
and degrees of contestation to the primary power’s leadership claim in its region in order
to preserve its autonomy and self-determination.
Conflicts over the assertion of regional leadership will impact the future world order
because their results will determine whether new global powers will be able to project
influence from a functional regional power base or they will be busy managing regional
conflicts. There is a growing literature discussing the strategies of secondary powers
towards regional powers. Critics of the contestation approach are right in arguing that

© 2015 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2015 Society for Latin American Studies.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
78 and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Institutional Contestation

other categories such as economic interests or regional security concerns are alternative
explanations for secondary powers’ strategic approaches towards primary powers. But
these explanations do not exclude each other; they are complementary and synergic. As
such, they are contemplated in the present article.
In this order of ideas, Colombia is one of the South American secondary powers
shaping the conditions of the Brazilian global rise, inter alia by way of its foreign policy
approach to the regional power. Thus, it is of interest to analyse its positions with respect
to Brazil. Our hypothesis is as follows: Since the first presidency of Juan Manuel Santos
(2010) there has been a strategic turn from collateral hard-balancing to institutional
contestation towards Brazil.
Colombia’s foreign policy approach towards Brazil under President Uribe
(2002–2010) has been termed collateral hard-balancing because even though the
military alliance with the United States was not directed against Brazil, but sought
to increase the military power to fight guerrillas and drug traffic, and challenged
the geostrategic interests of the regional power (Flemes and Wehner, 2015). In other
words, the agreement for the use of Colombian military bases by the US Armed
Forces or the air raid on the FARC camp in Ecuador (2008), exemplified how
President Uribe’s foreign policy was above all, a domestic policy instrument of the
so-called seguridad democrática (democratic security). Consequently, the foreign
policy priority was the security-based political relationship with the United States,
which led to Colombia’s isolation in South America and difficulty in its relationship
with Brazil.
In contrast, Colombia’s regional approach under President Santos can be termed
turning to the South, and reflects a more balanced positioning of Colombia between
the US and Brazil. Santos has de-ideologised Colombian foreign policy, in particular
by making decisive efforts to normalise the country’s relationship with Venezuela. The
most strategic foreign policy project of the Santos administration is Colombia’s engage-
ment in the Pacific Alliance (PA), together with Chile, Peru and Mexico. The alliance
is a more liberal and market-oriented alternative to Brazilian-led economic cooperation
processes, particularly the stagnating Mercosur. Regardless of whether the PA will try to
attract or continue to exclude Brazil (exclusive institutional balancing) in the long term,
it proposes an ideologically divergent model of regionalism from that of the Brazilian-led
institutions of Mercosur and UNASUR and, therefore, competes and overlaps with them
(inter-institutional balancing).
In addition to studying the strategic shift that has taken place under President
Santos, we aim to shed light on the causes of this change. To do so, we have formulated
the following research question: what are the causes of strategic variance, and how
can we explain the turn from a direct-revisionist contestation approach (collateral
hard-balancing) to an indirect-revisionist strategy (institutional contestation)?
In order to tackle this question and test our hypothesis, we present an interpretative
framework in the second section that includes structured overviews of both alternative
contestation strategies and the different drivers that potentially cause secondary powers
to adopt contestational approaches to primary powers. In the third and fourth sections,
we apply these conceptual instruments to the empirics of Colombian–Brazilian relations
in order to verify our working hypothesis and to answer our key question on the causes
of strategic variance and the drivers of Colombia’s institutional contestation through the
Pacific Alliance. In addition, we use the control variables: economic and political inter-
ests, to develop complementary explanations of Colombia’s strategic turn in regional
politics after 2010.
© 2015 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2015 Society for Latin American Studies
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 Daniel Flemes and Rafael Castro

Interpretative Framework: Strategies and Causes of Contestation

In the context of the contestation strategies that secondary powers can deploy towards
their rising neighbours, the typology shown in Table 1 conceptualises the different paths
that secondary powers can use to contest.
The main rationale behind this typology is to distinguish between the means and
goals of regional contestation strategies. This distinction is crucial if one understands
the ontological core of strategy as the matching of goals and means. Revisionism and
directness are particularly powerful indicators for differentiating the essential goals and
means of regional contestation (Ebert, Flemes and Strüver, 2014: 231).
Revisionism means to revert, stall or contain the primary power’s claim to regional
supremacy. In adopting a revisionist strategy, a secondary power seeks to reorder the
distribution of goods in the region. The contested goods are not confined to material
capabilities; they also include variables such as ideology (e.g., the regime type or a
regional model of cooperation), status and prestige. Revisionist strategies are conflic-
tive in nature as they seek to implement preferences that oppose those of the primary
power.
Non-revisionist strategies refrain from challenging the existing order, with the sec-
ond state seeking instead to actively maximise its relative leverage in certain regional
policy areas. These strategies aim to offset security risks, maintain regional stability and
compete with the primary power on limited levels (Ebert et al., 2014: 231).
Direct contestation immediately addresses the regional power and confronts its pri-
macy via specific interactions. Specific interactions range from the weaker state’s initi-
ation of a military confrontation via an extensive arms build-up or the building of an
exclusive military alliance with a competitor or enemy of the regional power to tar-
geted economic sanctions. Such strategies involve capability-based policies such as the
movement of the secondary power’s own troops or of external troops in ways that are
perceived as a threat by the primary power.
Indirect contestation strategies utilise intermediaries such as external actors, formal
and informal institutions, or constitutive principles such as legitimacy or order (Ebert
et al., 2014: 233). In order to avoid overt confrontation, secondary powers employ per-
suasive tactics that rely on identity-based rather than capability-based approaches.
Secondary powers can use multiple foreign policy strategies to contest the regional
power. The four resulting ideal-typical groups of hard-balancing, soft-balancing,
reformism and resignation are thus not mutually exclusive. In that order of ideas, we
expect secondary powers to diversify their strategies when facing uncertainty about
threat perceptions or a power transition. However, institutional contestation is a
subtype of soft-balancing and, therefore, an indirect-revisionist strategy that works
through the rules of formal or informal institutions and by way of engaging in limited

Table 1. Varieties of Contestation

Strategic means
Direct Indirect

Strategic goals Revisionist Hard-balancing Soft-balancing

Non-revisionist Reformism Resignation

Source: Ebert et al. (2014).

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80 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 35, No. 1
 Institutional Contestation

diplomatic alliances. The following foreign policy strategies are subsumed under the
umbrella of institutional contestation and will serve as conceptual tools for the second
part of this article.
Buffering is a soft balancing strategy that aims to deepen economic and security coop-
eration with other regional states in order to increase the secondary power’s leverage
over the regional power; institutional contestation and its specifications are subtypes of
buffering and make up the key categories in this article’s empirical analysis:

(i) Institutional contestation consists of questioning the legitimacy, central signifi-

cance or effectiveness of institutions led by primary powers – and possibly the
norms and values on which the current regional order is based. Institutional
contestation can be projected through formal and informal institutional instru-
ments, including autonomous cooperation initiatives that propose and promote
a different model of regionalism than the one led by the primary power.
(ii) Exclusive institutional balancing stresses the exclusion of the primary power
from the cooperation process in question (He, 2015: 215).
(iii) Inter-institutional balancing challenges the relevance of other regional institu-
tions dedicated to similar issue areas (He, 2015: 217).
(iv) Delegitimation means that the secondary power seeks to indirectly alter the dis-
tribution of ideational goods such as regional norms, dominant values, economic
models and the culture of cooperation, as well as the status and reputation of
regional institutions (Ebert et al., 2014: 236).

Besides tackling the possible ways that secondary powers can contest the regional power,
we aim to identify the key drivers of each type of contestation policy. We distinguish
between behavioural, structural and domestic causes of secondary powers’ contestation
of primary powers.
Behavioural causes of contestation are related to the foreign policy conduct of the
regional power. The main question is whether the regional power meets the secondary
power’s expectations regarding its provision of different types of constructive leadership
(Flemes and Wehner, 2015: 167).
Additionally, our analysis includes structural drivers of contestation. The polarity in
the regional system can influence the contestation policy implemented by the secondary
powers. In South America, the regional order is characterised by unipolarity and relative
power symmetry between secondary powers such as Colombia, Venezuela, Chile and
Argentina. In addition, the region is a security community and thus excludes strategies
based on military violence. Hence, secondary powers strategies are primarily limited to
different expressions of soft-balancing (Flemes and Wehner, 2015:165).
Finally, domestic causes of contestation have to be included in explanations of sec-
ondary powers foreign policy choices vis-à-vis primary powers. The foreign-policy elite
(FPE) perceptions of the international power structure and the behaviour of the regional
power are, therefore, a key variable. However, the FPE, and with it strategic prefer-
ences, can vary due to government changes. Furthermore, the relative autonomy of
the FPE depends on the degree of influence of a range of domestic actors that might
directly or indirectly contribute to the formulation of the strategic approach towards
the primary power (Flemes and Wehner, 2015: 168f). We also assume that high lev-
els of regional polarity promote indirect contestation strategies. In other words, if the
power gap between both players increases in favour of the regional power, it is likely
that the secondary power will adjust its revisionist approach from hard-balancing to
soft-balancing.

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 Daniel Flemes and Rafael Castro

Colombia’s Strategic Responses to a Rising Brazil

The Presidencies of Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010): Collateral Hard-Balancing

Colombia’s alignment of its foreign policy with that of the United States has histor-
ically been one of the main features of its external relations. This characteristic was
deepened during the administrations of President Uribe, causing strong reactions in
Colombia’s neighbourhood. The country was called the ‘Cain’ and the ‘Israel’ of Latin
America because of its strict alignment with the United States, which was seen as turn-
ing its back on its neighbours (Rojas, 2006: 102). This perception was mainly based
on two situations: Colombia’s support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its grant-
ing of permission in 2009 for US military personnel to use Colombian military bases
(Carvajal, 2012b).
In this context, President Uribe also tried to present the internal conflict taking place
in Colombia as part of the ‘global crusade’, led by the United States, against terrorism
and drug trafficking (Tokatlian, 2009: 181; Ramírez, 2011). This foreign policy strategy
aimed to ensure that the international community recognised internal rebel groups as
terrorists and provided aid to fight them, a situation that has been conceptualised as the
terrorisation of foreign policy (Rojas, 2006: 89–91). At the same time, the securitisation
and narcotisation of this policy took place, making drugs, terrorism and security the key
issues of the external agenda.
This heavy-handed approach to fighting the illegal groups resulted in disputes with
Venezuela and Ecuador. The first major incident took place in 2008, after the Colom-
bian military bombed a camp of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia
(FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) located in Ecuador without the per-
mission of the Ecuadorian government. A second conflict occurred when President Uribe
denounced Venezuela at the Organization of American States (OAS) for tolerating FARC
camps in its territory. In both cases diplomatic relations were broken off, and trade rela-
tions with Venezuela were also cut (Pastrana and Vera, 2012a).
Even if these actions didn’t directly aim to contest Brazil as the regional power
of South America, they can be interpreted as collateral hard-balancing given that
Itamaraty had tried to build a region more independent from US influence in terms
of institutions, security, economics and politics – for example, through the creation
of the UNASUR to manage, among other things, security affairs without the direct
involvement of the United States and the OAS. It is worth noting that during President
Uribe’s administrations Colombia did not back the idea of a UNASUR, concluding that
it was going to serve as a forum for anti-American rhetoric and criticism of the Plan
Colombia (Flemes and Wehner, 2015: 172). Instead, it sought to increase its security
cooperation with the United States through the agreement on the United States’ use of
Colombian military bases.
In addition, during President Uribe’s time in office there was mutual distrust, as
former Brazilian president Lula da Silva put it (Terra, 2011), between Colombia and
the regional power. This was the case, in part, because of Lula’s closeness to the leftist
presidents in the region and because Brazil never recognised the FARC as a terrorist
group, which in President Uribe’s interpretation was enough not to classify Brazil as
an ‘ally’ in the war on terrorism. At the same time, President Lula da Silva considered
President Uribe’s automatic alignment with the United States to be a source of division
and conflict in the region and as opposing Brazil’s aim to make South America as a
region more independent from the influence of the United States.

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 Institutional Contestation

In sum, during Uribe’s administration, Colombia opted to build a strong relationship

with an external power, especially in terms of security. It thereby utilised, consciously or
not, a collateral-hard-balancing approach against the regional power and thus hampered
Brazil’s quest for a more independent region. It also increased Brazil’s threat percep-
tion vis-à-vis the United States, particularly regarding the Amazon, because of Brazil’s
shared border with Colombia in this area, which is one of the former’s key territorial
vulnerabilities.

Strategic Turn to Institutional Contestation through the Pacific Alliance

With the election of Juan Manuel Santos as president (2010 to present), a period of
geographical diversification of Colombian foreign policy began. This strategy was
intended to improve relations with countries in the region through high-profile diplo-
matic meetings, increased participation in regional governance institutions, and the
signing of bilateral cooperation agreements, among other measures. Colombia also
began strengthening relations with the European Union and some Asian countries,
leading to a relative easing of its alignment with the United States. Similarly, a thematic
diversification, which prioritised new issues in Colombian foreign policy, such as trade,
conflict management and environmental protection, took place as the country sought
to establish more connections with the international economy. Colombia signed more
free trade agreements and increased its participation in global governance institutions.
These strategies and discourses regarding regional and global governance, among other
things, aimed to present Colombia as a reliable business partner and a country striving
for peace (Pastrana and Vera, 2012b; Borda, 2014: 332). However, other analysts argue
that although these issues have become less of a priority, they remain an important
focus in the country’s foreign policy agenda, representing merely a pragmatic or man-
agerial shift, not a substantial transformation of Colombia’s foreign policy (Ramírez,
2011; Pastrana and Vera, 2012a). From our perspective, Colombia’s participation
in the PA represents not only a managerial or pragmatic but also a strategic and
substantial shift.
With regard to South America, it can be pointed out that during Santos’s adminis-
tration there has been a ‘return’ to the region, which is especially evident in Colom-
bia’s improvement of its relationships with its neighbours; in its active participation in
UNASUR; and in its relative strengthening of bilateral relations with Brazil (Ramírez,
2011). A number of bilateral agreements between the two countries were concluded in
multiple areas (security, shared borders, knowledge exchange, education and research,
biofuels, etc.) in 2010 and 2012, marking a substantial turn in the relationship. It has
been claimed that the improvements in the relationship have also been made possible
by Santos’s and Rousseff’s more pragmatic style of foreign policy (Pastrana, 2011). In
addition, after the Colombian constitutional court declared the agreement to let the
United States use Colombian military bases to be unconstitutional, President Santos
decided not to revive it, a decision that was received very positively by the Brazilian
government.
Nevertheless, even though there is now an important cooperative element to the
bilateral relationship, Colombia does not fully accept and support Brazil’s regional lead-
ership claim. At the same time Colombia is adopting a cooperative approach towards
the regional power, it is also utilising competitive strategies. We can observe that it takes
a soft-balancing approach to Brazil via several organisations; Colombia doesn’t back
Brazil’s candidacy for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council as it participates
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 Daniel Flemes and Rafael Castro

in the competing Uniting for Consensus group (Hansen, 2012). President Santos crit-
icised the approach of the Brazilian-led UN Mission to Haiti (MINUSTAH) as being
pre-eminently military with too few elements of civilian reconstruction and too little
participation of the Haitian government and people when he spoke at the UN General
Assembly in 2011 (Santos, 2011). Colombia signed an agreement with NATO in 2013
to, among other things, cooperate on peacekeeping operations, to exchange classified
information, and to fight organised crime and terrorism. The agreement includes a confi-
dentiality clause and was clearly rejected by Brazil. Then defence minister Celso Amorim
declared that the extra-regional military cooperation was cause for concern in the region
(Croda, 2013). The NATO agreement can be considered an instrument of institutional
contestation aiming to balance the UNASUR South American Defence Council (SADC),
an institution promoting the construction of a regional security order independent from
external actors. And finally, Colombia defends the relevance of US-driven regional
organisations such as the OAS and the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) instead
of decisively supporting the South American institutions led by Brazil.
While there is significant evidence of soft-balancing behaviour towards Brazil on the
part of Colombia, not least in the institutional spheres of defence and security policy,
in this empirical section we focus on one particular element of the secondary power’s
indirect-revisionist approach, which is more economy-driven: institutional contestation
through the Pacific Alliance.
During President Santos’s time in office, Colombia’s strategy to contest Brazil as
the regional power has shifted from collateral hard-balancing to institutional contes-
tation, mainly through the Pacific Alliance. This institution can be interpreted as a
soft-balancing strategy because it constitutes a diplomatic alliance between some of
South America’s secondary powers. It also includes Mexico – and, potentially, some
countries from Central America – which has traditionally been excluded from the
Brazilian geopolitical delimitation of the region because of its alignment with the United
States (Betancourt, 2012: 325). The alliance seeks to strengthen economic cooperation
among peers, possibly allowing them to exert more leverage over the regional power;
therefore, it can be interpreted as a buffering strategy. This leverage can operate in four
ways:

(i) Institutional contestation: The PA seeks to implement the model of open region-
alism not only between its members but also with the world. This model is
contrary to Brazilian post-hegemonic regionalism. Open regionalism advocates
for an opening-up of trade relations among the states and the promotion of a
free market economy (Phillips, 2002). In contrast to this form of regionalisation,
there has been a rise of leftist governments in South America, which have begun
designing post-hegemonic regionalism projects, ALBA and partly, the UNASUR
are included within this category (Riggirozzi, 2012), and are characterised by
the promotion of alternatives to liberal economic models; a focus not on the
commercial dimension of regionalism, with the aim of advancing an agenda of
positive integration and all of the above, in order to avoid the interference of
the United States by promoting South American regional institutions and down-
playing the importance of Pan-American groupings such as the OAS (Sanahuja,
2012). To summarise, the PA proposes an open regionalism that is in contrast
to the post-hegemonic regionalism Brazil fosters.
The PA also exhibits political tensions with leftist governments in the region,
which claim that it has the potential to become an organisation of political
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84 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 35, No. 1
 Institutional Contestation

consensus driven by the political and military interests of the United States. These
critics also argue that the PA could contest the UNASUR – that is, they interpret
the PA as an inter-institutional balancing strategy. One of the roots of this con-
cern is the PA’s constitutive treaty, which addresses the possibility of dealing
with security affairs through this institution, thereby colliding with the idea of
discussing and cooperating on this sort of issues within the SADC.
(ii) Inter-institutional balancing (He, 2015: 217–219): The PA also challenges the
relevance of another regional institution dedicated to economic issues, which has
been led by Brazil: Mercosur. Both Paraguay and Uruguay have been accepted
as observer states of this process (Nolte and Wehner, 2013: 5), and some of their
officials have expressed the importance of becoming member states. With the
possible departure of Mercosur members to join the Alliance, Brazil would be
forced to consider the possibility of building bridges with this institution by con-
structing a new economic project or reformulating the existing one to embrace
more openness.
If one of these scenarios is achieved, the free trade interests of the PA members
will be asserted. The recent petition of President Rousseff at the 2014 Mercosur
summit to accelerate Mercosur’s process of liberalisation reaching the respective
goals by 2015 instead of 2019 can also be seen as a reaction to the PA and,
hence, as a successful case of inter-institutional balancing by the PA’s member
countries.
(iii) Exclusive institutional balancing: With the exclusion of Brazil from this insti-
tution, another form of institutional balancing has been displayed (He, 2015:
215–216). This contestation tool puts Colombia and the other members of the
PA in a position to exert pressure on Brazil; on the other hand, it reduces Brazil’s
influence and leverage over the PA members.
This exclusion could also be geopolitically relevant. It has been argued that if
the PA solidifies, it could become the block with which the EU concludes those
trade agreements that have been stalled in its troubled relationships with the
Mercosur and the ALBA (Nolte and Wehner, 2013). In future, this could lead
to a convergence between the PA, the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) and the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), creating a mega trade
bloc that would exclude the Mercosur countries.
(iv) Delegitimation is another strategic dimension that has to be included in our
analysis. The PA has been a platform for the delegitimation of Brazilian-led
institutions through its challenging of regional norms, especially those of the
Mercosur. It presents itself as a very pragmatic forum where results are achieved
quickly, without much governmental disagreement and as an institution with
a free-trade-agreement strategy intended to more effectively increase trade and
attract foreign investment – in stark contrast to Mercosur’s current identity cri-
sis (Oelsner, 2013: 125–126) and internal politicisation.

As mentioned above, besides Colombia’s contestation of the Brazilian leadership claim,

a range of alternative motives such as trade and investment interests can further explain
the foreign policy choices of Santos’s government. The country’s application of contes-
tational policies towards the regional power does not preclude these explanations; both
rationales are complementary and synergistic. Therefore, in the next section we shed
light on both.

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Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 35, No. 1 85
 Daniel Flemes and Rafael Castro

Reasons for Colombia’s Engagement in the Pacific Alliance

Strategic Perspective: Drivers of Institutional Contestation

As described in the interpretative framework, there are diverse reasons why secondary
powers utilise a contestational approach towards regional powers. In this section, we
explore the behavioural, domestic and structural causes of the institutional contestation
approach Colombia has applied during President Santos’s administrations.
As for the behavioural causes, it can be argued that while Brazil demonstrated consen-
sual leadership during President Lula da Silva’s administration, this approach has not
been continued under President Rousseff. Consensual leadership refers to the leader’s
capacity to bridge political and ideological differences between regional countries, which
can lead to the construction of a ‘consensual hegemony’ (Burges, 2015). Brazil does not
exercise this type of leadership as it fails to incorporate Colombia’s and the other PA
members’ ideas about and interests in regional and global integration within the regional
framework it proposes. The strongest driver of contestation is the lack of multilateral
leadership; Brazil is unwilling to build inclusive and participative regional institutions
that would allow regional states to participate in regional decision-making processes.
In the Colombian case, it must also be mentioned that the regional project fostered
by Brazil does not fully represent Colombia’s economic interests, which are an essential
part of its current foreign policy. This disconnect is also linked with the fact that the
normative leadership that Brazil exercises is built on nors and values (democracy, social
market economy and non-intervention in internal affairs, among other things) that don’t
entirely correspond to those put forward by Colombia – as was illustrated above with
Colombia’s defence of liberal market policies and Brazil’s championing of a social market
economy (Flemes and Wehner, 2015: 167). Finally, while Brazil does invest in regional
infrastructure projects such as the IIRSA and promotes regional energy security, it is not
willing or able to pay most of the costs of economic integration, leading some states to
criticise its unwillingness to exercise distributional leadership.
Another factor that can help explain a country’s use of a certain contestational policy
is the structure of the region under analysis. The changes in the distribution of material
capabilities in South America shed some light on why Colombia has decided to shift from
a collateral-hard-balancing strategy to one of institutional contestation. In general, the
greater the regional power’s superiority in terms of resources, the less likely it is that the
secondary power will use a direct approach such as collateral hard-balancing and the
more likely it is that it will adopt an indirect approach such as institutional contestation
(Ebert et al., 2014).
The gap in material resources between Brazil and Colombia slightly increased during
the years before President Santos took over (see Table 2), which might have fostered the
latter’s turn from a direct to an indirect contestational approach. In this respect, it might
be of greater importance to consider the United States’ decreasing material support for
the ‘Plan Colombia’, which had helped President Uribe increase military expenditures.
Brazil’s superiority can be observed not only in terms of material resources, but also in
terms of institutional and discursive resources. Institutionally, Brazil has a leadership role
in UNASUR and Mercosur; it also symbolically represents the region in global gover-
nance institutions such as the G20 and the WTO, and it is seeking opportunities through
global coalitions such as the G4, BRICS and IBSA. Discursively speaking, Brazil received
increasingly more global media attention in the years before the Colombian change of
government. Also, its well-trained diplomatic service, its clear ideas and interests, and its

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 Institutional Contestation

Table 2. Material Capabilities of Brazil and Colombia (2009)

Material capabilities Brazil Colombia

Defence budget (US$M) 25,654 9033

Oil production (1000 barrels per day) 2561.71 690.27
GDP (US$M) 1,620,188 233,822
Global competitiveness index 56 69

Sources: Military expenditure (SIPRI, 2014), Oil production (EIA, 2014), GDP (World Bank, 2014),
Global Competitiveness Index (World Economic Forum, 2014).

Table 3. Material Capabilities of the Regional Power and the Secondary Powers (2009)

Material capabilities Argentina Brazil Chile Colombia Venezuela

Defence budget (US$M) 2982 25,654 3760 9033 4020

Oil production (1000 801.65 2561.71 12.97 690.27 2710.29
barrels per day)
GDP (US$M) 378,496 1,620,188 172,323 233,822 329,419
Global competitiveness 85 56 30 69 113
index

Sources: Military expenditure (SIPRI, 2014), Oil production (EIA, 2014), GDP (World Bank, 2014),
Global Competitiveness Index (World Economic Forum, 2014).

Table 4. Material Capabilities of the Regional Power and the Secondary Powers (2013)

Material capabilities Argentina Brazil Chile Colombia Venezuela

Defence budget (US$M) 4511 31,456 5435 13,003 5313

Oil production (1000 barrels per day) 707.91 2693.86 16.07 1028.47 2689.24
GDP (US$M) 609,889 2,245,673 277,199 378,415 438,284
Global competitiveness index 104 56 34 69 134

Sources: Military expenditure (SIPRI, 2014), Oil production (EIA, 2014), GDP (World Bank, 2014),
Global Competitiveness Index (World Economic Forum, 2014).

strategies to advance them make it diplomatically more relevant and capable of agenda
setting in global discussions. Colombia, on the other hand, has not played a leadership
role in regional institutions, nor does it have a strong voice in global discussions. It also
still lacks a fully professionalised foreign service.
Finally, as we can see from Tables 3 and 4, Colombia’s material capabilities (especially
its GDP and its defence budget) have increased considerably in comparison to the other
South American secondary powers.
The development of the material indicators in favour of Colombia have fostered
the country’s regional weight and explain why its government wants to play a stronger
role in the region, projecting itself not only as one of the secondary powers in South
America but as the secondary power in terms of material and ideational capabili-
ties. Colombia has been projecting itself as a bridge country that employs a multiple
links strategy to bring together diverse geopolitical interests, countries and institu-
tions that are generally seen as leading in different directions – for example, NAFTA
© 2015 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2015 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 35, No. 1 87
 Daniel Flemes and Rafael Castro

and Mercosur, or the United States and Cuba in the OAS summit (Carvajal, 2012a;
Pastrana, 2014: 91).
Even though the behavioural and structural factors mentioned above might have
supported the strategic turn of the Colombian secondary power, a general observation
suggests that domestic drivers played a dominant role in the strategic shift. Ripsman
(2009: 186), argues that in a region with low levels of international threat, domestic
factors will have a stronger influence on foreign policy than they will in conflictive envi-
ronments. South America can be defined as a nascent security community with emerging
institutions that have been created to lower transaction costs and to increase mutual
trust. In addition, South America demonstrates the key characteristic of an ascendant
security community: the decreased fear that other members of the community represent
a threat (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 50–53). This is particularly true in the case of Brazil
and Colombia, as there is no conflict hypothesis between them and no possibility of
them using military means to solve disputes.
The main domestic reason for the shift in tactics was the election of President Santos.
He has taken a less ideological and more pragmatic approach to Colombia’s interna-
tional relations than his predecessor. This approach, along with his aim to geographically
and thematically diversify Colombia’s foreign policy has allowed him to cooperate with
countries that have different political and economic systems without generating much
controversy (Pastrana and Vera, 2012a: 58).
It is important to observe that this was a necessary turn for the Colombian industrial
sector, which had suffered from the breaking-off of trade relations with Venezuela,
formerly one of the main export destinations for Colombian manufactured prod-
ucts (Flemes, 2012: 33). Domestic actors such as the National Business Association
(ANDI) and the National Federation of Traders (FENALCO) have supported a more
free-trade-oriented economic foreign policy vis-à-vis the members of the PA. These
actors support to the alliance can be linked to the opportunity to increase their exports,
integrate their industries and generate regional value chains. Also, the PA has been
created with Mexico, Chile and Peru because the Santos administration has found them
to have more values in common and to share similar visions for how to increase interna-
tional trade, internationalise their economies and attract more foreign investment. They
also share ideas about global geo-economics, with the most important being that they
all want to expand their economic relations with the Asia-Pacific region (Betancourt,
Castro and Pastrana, 2014: 175–177).
As complementary to the institutional contestation perspective we can consider that
there are pragmatic reasons for Colombia’s participation in the PA. Politically, the coun-
try expects this institution might increase its chances to become an APEC member and
to participate in the TPP negotiations, especially by securing the support of the rest of
the PA states, which are already members. On the economic side, Colombia is mainly
attempting (a) to increase its manufacturing exports to the countries of the PA, (b) to cre-
ate a regional production platform that allows the member countries to work together
to export value-added products to different regions, (c) to strengthen its production by
integrating high technology, (d) to increase intra-regional investment (Gutiérrez et al.,
2013: 9), (e) to attract more foreign investment and tourism.

Conclusion
This article has investigated Colombia’s foreign policy shift from relative isolation in
South America including a distanced relationship to Brazil towards its engagement in

© 2015 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2015 Society for Latin American Studies
88 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 35, No. 1
 Institutional Contestation

the PA that has been identified as a factor of major influence for the bilateral relations
between Brazil and Colombia.
First, we have verified the hypothesis that Colombia has undergone a strategic
turn, from collateral hard-balancing involving strong military cooperation with the
United States during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe to institutional contestation under
President Santos. Empirical evidence has been presented in support of the thesis that
soft-balancing, buffering, inter-institutional balancing, exclusive institutional balancing
and delegitimation strategies are currently being applied through the PA, which excludes
Brazil and ideationally contests the Brazilian-led institutions Mercosur and UNASUR.
The Alliance is doing this by proposing an alternative institution with different norms
and values and, most importantly, a different type of regionalism.
We have argued, second, that the main reasons for this strategic turn from collateral
hard-balancing to institutional contestation through the PA are located at the domestic
level: the change of government and President Santos’s more pragmatic foreign-policy
approach. The strategic turn has also reduced confrontation with neighbouring countries
and fostered regional exports, which is in the best interest of the Colombian business
associations. In addition, the change has been driven by the shared interests of the PA
members, especially on geo-economic issues.
Third, we have found that the regional structure of a unipolar security community
has been stable over the presidencies of Uribe and Santos, but that it has played a part in
excluding balancing behaviour based on military violence. Brazil’s increasing material
and diplomatic superiority since 2008 have impeded a strategic turn towards more direct
contestational approaches. The increasing regional power ratio might have contributed
to Colombia’s decision to scale down the directness of the contestation approach, as a
collateral-hard-balancing approach to Brazil based largely on US capabilities no longer
seeming useful in the face of the Brazilian rise, the relative global decline of the United
States, and decreased support for the Plan Colombia.
Fourth, the article has suggested that Colombia’s contestation also seems to be driven
largely by the foreign policy behaviour of the regional power – that is mainly, the lack
of multilateral and, partly, distributional leadership on the part of Brazil.
Fifth, in addition to motives derived from the perspective of strategic contestation,
we have included Colombia’s economic and political interests in our analysis as an addi-
tional and complementary reason for its participation in the PA. The expected economic
benefits are, in sum, an increase in the country’s exports to the members of the PA and to
the Asia-Pacific countries, the generation of regional value chains, the attraction of more
foreign investment, tourism, and increased technology transfers. We have also found
that political benefits such as possible support for joining APEC and the TPP negotia-
tions and a greater presence in the Asia-Pacific region are further drivers of Colombia’s
participation in the PA.
In summary, both groups of drivers, strategic considerations as well as the more prag-
matic political and economic benefits expected from participation in the PA, have rein-
forced each other in a synergistic way. The administration of President Santos decided
to take a more indirect contestational approach towards the regional power, preferring
the soft-balancing strategy of institutional contestation through the PA. This change
has been promoted by domestic, structural and behavioural foreign policy drivers.
Colombia’s positive economic expectations have obviously encouraged the secondary
power’s participation in the pro-market alliance that is contesting the Brazilian model of
regionalism.
© 2015 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2015 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 35, No. 1 89
 Daniel Flemes and Rafael Castro

Acknowledgements
We thank K. Bodemer, M. Carpes, E. Pastrana, S. Scholvin, D. Vera, and all partici-
pants of the ProCol/DAAD conference in Bogotá (February 2015) for their very helpful
comments. Daniel Flemes would also like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for
its generous support of the ‘Contested Leadership in International Relations’ research
project.

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