Acceso usuarios
Luis Leandro Schenoni, Esteban Actis
During the last twenty years or more, relations between Argentina and Brazil started to show some asymmetries that could be interpreted as a path towards a Brazilian hegemony in South America, imposing a new dynamic to their bilateral relations. This trend is not only evident in the quantitative uprise of Brazilian material capabilities vis a vis its southern neighbor, but also qualitatively, in some military and economic aspects of the bilateral relation. Intending to grasp this process, the present article analyzes the concepts of "Hegemony" and "Balance of Power"¹ and evaluates to what extent -and regarding which aspects-, the unipolar relation resembles the former or the later ideal type. After a detailed study of the military and economic dimensions of the bilateral relation, this article concludes that it is only in the economic aspects that the relation is getting increasingly asymmetric, even if still far from a regional hegemony. Finally, the concept of "regional unipolarity with an economic bias" is proposed to better describe the current stage of Argentina-Brazil relations.
