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Abstract
In this dissertation I explain the adoption and implementation of integration policies in the nuclear sector by Argentina and Brazil, from 1985 to 1991. While the adoption and implementation of regional integration may correspond to two different policy moments, I take them to be sequential, and thus as constituting one process of regionalization. My research shows that the Argentine-Brazilian integration process was brought about by a group of nuclear professionals on both sides of the border. The actions of this epistemic community support the causal logic advanced by students of knowledge-based networks. Epistemic communities are provided an opportunity to advance their policy proposal when decision-makers need to decide policy alternatives under uncertain conditions. The group of experts interprets the viability and rightness of the different options and becomes institutionalized once the political leadership adopts the epistemic proposal. Institutionalization thus corresponds with the second policy moment, i.e.: implementation of the epistemic policy. I argue that institutionalization opens up a bargaining phase where epistemic and political actors negotiate the implementation of the chosen policy. In summary, I assert that the adoption of the first Argentine-Brazilian agreement on nuclear regionalization in 1985 resulted from the role of a transnational coalition of professionals of the field who helped define nuclear policy alternatives available to decision-makers. The timing of this first move was given by the democratization process and the effect of the foreign debt crisis on the two economies. The implementation of nuclear integration was carried out by the same group of Argentine-Brazilian nuclear experts, who continuously bargained with political actors the goals and actual execution of nuclear regionalization. My research shows that they were two key factors affecting the success of these professionals throughout the adoption and implementation of nuclear integration: the continued access to decision-makers that nuclear experts enjoyed, and the way their ideas on a bilateral nuclear partnership strongly resonated with the new democratic leadership's political agenda of developmental economics and Third World non-alignment.
This dissertation shows one way in which ideas affect political outcomes. By stating the conditions under which epistemic communities may influence the adoption and implementation of regional policy, my research improves our understanding of how knowledge and technological expertise affect international politics. Ideas also explain why Argentina and Brazil uniquely went from a nuclear development race in the Third World to regulated, peaceful cooperation. Both Argentina and Brazil had reached by the early 1980s a threshold status in nuclear development. That is, the development of nuclear weapons would have been achievable if there had been political will. By identifying the motivations of nuclear experts for regionalization we can gain understanding on their drive for technological development. The “moral ambition” of Argentine and Brazilian professionals was not a military one. Rather, international prestige and industrial development were their goals.
