Integrancia: el hábito de integrar como gobernanza cotidiana y nueva competencia del siglo XXI

The great processes of regional integration - economic, political, cultural- have historically been conceptualized from the outside: as normative architectures designed by experts, negotiated by diplomats, and implemented by institutions. This conceptualization, dominant in the international relations and international law literature, leaves untheorized a dimension that ultimately determines the success or failure of any integration process: the interior, everyday, and behavioral dimension of integration — what occurs in the mindset, habits, and daily practices of those who live in integrated or integrating spaces. This work proposes the concept of integrancia to name and theorize this dimension: the habit of integrating, understood as the everyday practice of governing integration from within; from the mindset, from conduct, from the permanent construction of what is thought and therefore built, and also from governance and public policy according to cultural practices aligned with the habit of integrating. Integrancia is not a state but a competency: a capacity that is developed, practiced, and strengthened through the daily exercise of integrating perspectives, experiences, cultural frameworks, and different reference systems into a coherent and functionally governed whole. In this sense, integrancia is proposed as a new twenty-first century competency — analogous in nature to the digital, communicative, or intercultural competencies that contemporary educational systems have incorporated as formative objectives, but specifically oriented toward the governance of integration in its personal, institutional, regional, and international dimensions. Its character as a competency — rather than a norm or a treaty— distinguishes it from predominant approaches in the regional integration literature and situates it at the intersection of international relations theory, the social psychology of integration, and the philosophy of language: because integrancia, like all competencies, begins in thought — and only what is thought, is built. The work concludes by proposing integrancia as an analytical category, as a public policy objective, and as a formative competency for a start, as its development constitutes the condition of possibility for a regional integration that is not only normatively complete but behaviorally sustainable. The use of the term, like that of any living concept in language, ultimately corresponds to the speakers who adopt, adapt, and enrich it with their own integration practices: this openness is constitutive of the nature of integrancia as everyday governance — always under construction, always determined by those who practice it.