THE ECONOMIC INTEGRATION TRAP

Economic integration is widely assumed to produce stability, discipline, and convergence. Yet across regions and decades, integration projects repeatedly generate crisis, political backlash, and fragmentation. Why?

The Economic Integration Trap argues that the failure of integration cannot be explained by ideology, globalization, or poor leadership alone. The problem is structural-and largely misunderstood. Integration transforms economic governance faster than political systems can adapt, shifting conflict into monetary institutions, legal frameworks, and welfare regimes ill-suited to carry it.

Rather than offering a single grand theory, this book dissects integration through its most fragile fault lines:
central bank independence, fiscal constraint, welfare expectations, migration pressures, crisis management, and institutional credibility. It shows how rules designed to stabilize markets can amplify instability when political adjustment mechanisms are weak-or absent.

Europe and Latin America provide contrasting but complementary cases. Europe built integration by constitutionalizing economic rules, suppressing political discretion in the name of credibility. Latin America retained discretion but failed to sustain commitment. Both paths produced instability-but through different mechanisms that are rarely analyzed together.

The book goes beyond familiar debates about austerity, sovereignty, or globalization. It examines how integration reshapes political incentives, how crises are reinterpreted as rule violations, and how economic governance increasingly operates through enforcement rather than coordination.

This is not a manifesto for or against integration. It is an analytical examination of why integration, when mismatched with political capacity, becomes a trap-one that disciplines, fragments, and hardens rather than converges.