It wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the next century an "Amerozone" was established much like in Europe. It's pretty obvious world leaders are trying to unite the western world, but I suspect their efforts are going to have a minimal economic impact. Am I the only one that remembers Bush saying "I want to unite the western hemisphere?" He wasn't joking...and remember, democrats and republicans, 2 heads on the same snake...
I'm hardly a Bush fan, but I think he was just repeating, in his own clumsy, half-witted style, the
Monroe Doctrine, which has been in place since 1823.
There are so many barriers to "unit[ing] the hemisphere": cultural, linguistic, economic, etc as to make such a thing impossible. Though there are patches and pockets of an affluence that approaches Canada or the US to our south, the overwhelming majority of residents live in a staggering amount of poverty.
Throughout the late 80s I had a Venezuelan lover and visited
Caracas twice (long before Chavez). Though I hadn't any real expectations prior to my first visit, I was floored by my first views of the city as I emerged from a tunnel drilled through the mountains that separate the city from the beach-front airport: it looked as if mid-town Manhattan had been transported to a tropical valley and increased in size my a factor of 100. Ribbons of highways ran between enormously tall buildings, many of which were covered in tropical vegetation as far as the eye could see. Though many of these skyscrapers were of the traditional business-type, just as many (judging by the balconies) were premium residential towers, which contrasted sharply with my more lurid condescension of the "third world".
Then I looked at the surrounding mountains, which hem in the city everywhere, and saw that they were covered with barrios (squatters dwellings made of refuse and bits of stolen/salvaged wreckage). I was told that just before every election, the government supplies enormous quantities of white paint to give the mountains a cleaner, almost festive feeling which belied the retched poverty so extreme that, should one venture up and inside (which I certainly wasn't interested in doing), one would be kidnapped or killed, whichever would bring the greatest, quickest gain.
My lover's family lived in a gated community on the foothills of yet another range of mountains; we were greeted by guards carrying automatic weapons before being allowed to continue to the house, which itself was walled and had a sophisticated security system in place. Though they were obviously very wealthy and the house was nicely decorated (though very dated by about 10 years), there was nothing about the place that you wouldn't have seen in nicer parts of Scottsdale or Ft Lauderdale. It certainly wasn't lavish, though his dad was the CEO of an insurance company and his mom was a VP at the Central Bank of Venezuela. The one genuine sign of affluence (American style) was the fact the everyone in the family had a driver for his/her car, and even that was more of a security issue than anything to do with pampering: they (the drivers) were all armed.
Considering the immense wealth oil brings to Venezuela (the only non-Arab member of OPEC), they might seem a more likely candidate for some sort of "union" with the US, but it was/is so corrupt, the extremes between poverty and relative affluence so extreme, and
their currency (The Bolivar) was/is so shakey that any real possibility of anything happening is too far into the future for us to bother with considering.
