Regionalism

The Emergence of “New Regionalism” Studies

Within international relations (IR), research investigates border-crossing coalitions at both the levels of meso-regional and macro-regional integration. Whereas the former examines smaller states that tend to integrate their economic, political, or military activities, the latter analyzes integration through larger trading blocs, continental organizations, or transcontinental consultation frames, such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China, coordinating their activities under the label of BRIC, or the alliance of India, Brazil, and South Africa, known as IBSA. At the same time, new regionalism highlights the absence of a well-functioning governance regime at a global level and the need for more cooperation that transcends the borders of individual nation-states.

Research on new regionalisms departs from traditional IR concern, which focuses on the interactions between nation-states, by addressing the approaches and methods employed by nation-states to confront global challenges and to organize international societies at least partly anew. Since most of these global challenges, such as the effects of climate change, are not only larger than nation-states but also affect smaller territories within countries in different ways, the analysis of new regionalism has to take into account border-crossing regions as well as the clustering of nation-states within new regions.

Another meaning of new regionalism addresses recent forms of governance at the urban level, which again positions the problem in an interregional and transnational framework. This new metropolitan regionalism—which is opposed to an older concept identified with reform movements during the 1950s and 1960s—reacts to the same global challenges as well as the retirement of the nation-state as a main actor of redistributive regimes, such as the case with the economic regions mentioned.

Thus, new regionalisms contribute at various levels to the emerging regime of territorialization, which currently seems to be replacing older regionalisms that were based solely on nation-states and international organizations. New regionalisms can be analyzed as a reaction to a recent wave of globalization characterized by patterns of inclusion relating to faster integration into world markets by means of free trade and transnational commodity chains. This relationship has been an object of strong criticism since expectations, primarily within the framework of development policy, were not met and new trade agreements, which were established during the past 20 years in forms of regional free trade agreements (RTAs) or preferential trade agreements (PTAs), were inspired by [Page 1457]what critics have called a climate of “competitive liberalization.” Among the motivations for concluding these agreements was the frustration with the slow progress in multilateral trade negotiations, for example, the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Against the background of a comparatively small number of RTAs since the 1950s, which were most often negotiated only by developed countries, beginning in the first half of the 1990s their number increased exponentially. By 2003 there were close to 200 such RTAs, with almost every country of the world being a signatory to one, while some countries signed more than 20. Regional integration and RTAs became a strategic instrument both for the United States and for the European Union to facilitate free trade as well as to overcome the deadlock in their multilateral negotiations.

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