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Abstract
Is comparative regionalism a field whose time has come? While the contemporary interest in comparing regions and regionalisms may be not completely new, it is different from older approaches. Our understanding of what makes regions has changed with social constructivist and critical theoretical approaches that have led to a less behavioural and more nuanced, complex, contested and fluid understanding of regions. Moreover, the globalisation phenomenon has deeply affected all social sciences and radically redefined the relative autonomy of regions. In keeping with the rapid growth and development of regionalism and institutions in the non-Western world, including in regions which were relatively late starters, such as Asia, there have emerged new ways of looking at regional cooperation, including claims about distinctive approaches and even ‘models’ that are not only different from those identified with the EU, but also supposedly more appropriate and thus ‘workable’ for non-Western regions than the EU straightjacket.
Notes
This article is based on the author's keynote address to the Conference on “Regional Integration in Europe and Africa: Models, Policies, and Comparative Perspectives”, University of Pretoria, South Africa, 16–18 February 2011.
1 Regionalism is defined here as purposive interaction, formal or informal, among state and non-state actors of a given area in pursuit of shared external, domestic and transnational goals. While the concept of regionalism can be very broad, the main referent of this article is regional international institutions and the transnational dynamics around them, as understood among comparative regionalism scholars, rather than the processes of substate mobilisation and cooperation as understood by scholars of comparative federalism, territorial politics or devolution in the European Union area. Examples of the latter would be the German Länder, the Spanish autonomous communities, the Italian regions, the devolved nations in the UK, Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium. The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need for this clarification.
2 Panikkar, “Regionalism and World Security”, 1. Panikkar was one of the most prolific and influential writers on Asian history and international relations of his time, best known for his formulation of the ‘Vasco Da Gama age’ in the classic work, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945.
3 Panikkar, “Regionalism and World Security”, 5–6.
4 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 539.
5 An important aspect here is that many of the champions of pan-Africanism were not from Africa itself, attesting to the possibility of an outside-in or sympathetic regionalism.
6 UN, Documents of the UNCIO, 9.
7 Ibid., 5
8 Weiner and Diez, European Integration Theory.
9 For an excellent overview, see Ibid.
10 Haas, “International Integration”, 378.
11 Ibid., 289.
12 Higgott, “The Theory and Practice of Region”, 23.
13 Haas, Obsolescence of Regional Integration Theory, and “Does Constructivism Subsume Neofunctionalism?”, 22–31.
14 Puchala, “The Integration Theorists”; Schmitter, “Neo-Neofunctionalism”. The transactionalist approach of Karl Deutsch and his associates, especially the idea of security communities, have been resurrected, albeit modified with a heavy infusion of constructivist concepts, such as ideas, norms and socialisation which were only implicit in the original theory. See Adler and Barnett, Security Communities; Acharya, Security Community in Southeast Asia.
15 See Hettne et al., Globalism and the New Regionalism. See also Telò, European Union and New Regionalism.
16 Critical perspectives have not been dealt with here, but they accentuated the emphasis of new regionalism on informal sectors and provided a powerful critique of EU-type neoliberalism.
17 Haas, “The Study of Regional Integration”, 117.
18 Here, the author is in fundamental disagreement with Philippe Schmitter, who argues forcefully that regionalism is about interest and not identity. This echoes his perspective that “integration is basically (but not exclusively) a rational process whereby actors calculate anticipated returns from various alternative strategies of participation in joint decision-making structures”, and that while “‘[i]rrational’ postures or strategies – whether for dogmatic/ideological or personal/emotive reasons – are never absent from social action, even at the international level … they are from this theory.” Schmitter, “Neo-Neofunctionalism”, 55. For the author, identity, including that based on ideological or emotive forces, matters, in Europe as much as elsewhere, although claims of a European identity could be exaggerated. The argument is not that values, culture and identity alone matter in shaping regionalism, but that it is equally fallacious to apply a rationalist straightjacket to the study of comparative regionalism.
19 Katzenstein, A World of Regions, 76, 81.
20 See, for example, Acharya, Security Community in Southeast Asia and Whose Ideas Matter.
21 Acharya, “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders”, 95–123.
22 Sbragia, “Comparative Regionalism: What Might it be?”, 44.
23 This question was addressed in the edited volume, Acharya and Johnston, Crafting Cooperation, and requires further study.
24 Acharya, “How Ideas Spread”.
