‘Consistency despite instability, resilience despite crises’ was the oxymoron I tried to elucidate in a book1 that Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano and José Briceño-Ruiz have decided to build upon. Latin America has, indeed, a very rich and puzzling history regarding regionalism. Since independence, the idea has always been there, but concrete steps were timid and often frustrating. After World War II, the initiatives proliferated, with a succession of four waves of agreements, in the years 1950–1960, 1970–1980, 1990 and 2000–2010. Each wave was launched by a paradigm shift intersecting with disruptions, mostly economic crises, and can be explained by a combination of convergence of interests and diffusion of ideas. I will come back to this point later on...