Mesoregionalism

The prefix meso is used to describe the middle or intermediate part of a structure or phenomenon. Applied to regionalism, the idea and classification of mesoregionalism and mesoregions cannot be properly understood outside a broader discussion of the emergence of regional economies and regionalist projects as key components of contemporary world order. Perhaps the simplest definition is to treat mesoregions as “regions within regions.” Mesoregionalism, therefore, suggests deliberate projects to inaugurate, consolidate, and develop mesoregions. As with the broader debate about regionalism in the global political economy, a key question must be the extent to which mesoregions emerge through the deliberate collective decisions of authoritative actors versus the degree to which they reflect the de facto growth of transnational economic spaces.

Mesoregionalism is often understood to be one way in which economic space is being reconstituted in the post–Cold War world. If this world order is thought to be “regionalized,” then mesoregionalism might be thought of as an intermediate level between the growth of macro regions, such as the European Union (EU), and smaller cross-border micro regions. Some mesoregions are supranational, but do not [Page 562]encompass entire regional spaces. Thus, formal projects such as Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and Mercosur have been identified as mesoregions because they constitute subparts of Asia or the Americas. These regions might be thought of as potential stepping-stones to wider Asian/Asia-Pacific or hemispheric integration in the same way that all regional blocs are considered by some to act as stimuli for globalization. But equally, mesoregions might form a node for resistance to wider macro-regional integration schemes. ASEAN, for example, could be read as an attempt to consolidate a tighter notion of Asia than is implicit within a body such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).

This suggests that mesoregions tend to be formed by collections of states. Two qualifiers need to be added. The first is that some self-defined mesoregions include spaces that embrace only parts of states. For example, the Puebla Panamá Plan—which seeks to facilitate commercial exchange and develop common infrastructures—uses the concept of “Meso America” to describe a space defined by Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and the southeastern states of Mexico. The second qualifier is that the term meso has long been applied to an emergent level of authority below national government, but above local governance structures. It follows that mesoregions may exist within existing states and as collaborative ventures between subregions of geographically adjacent states.

The formation and growth of mesoregions may follow economic or political rationales. They are often held to be interest driven insofar as they can be traced to networking and negotiations among elites. At the same time, most discussions of mesoregions hold that certain preconditions need to hold before they come into existence. Communication links, a transport infrastructure, and a mutually comprehensible industrial and economic culture may be key background conditions, but shared historical experiences and common values are equally held to facilitate the successful imagination of the mesoregion. The Baltic Sea region comes close to this model, where a commercial-economic project is underwritten by rhetorical appeal to a shared organic-historical rationale. The extent to which a mesoregion flourishes may depend on these variables, but such projects are usually functional and thinly institutionalized. Mesoregionalist projects tend to lack the inherently expansive logics of entities such as the EU.

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