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European Union and New Regionalism

16 See S. Haggard, Regionalism in Asia and in the Americas, in E. D. Mansﬁeld and H. V.

Milner eds. (1997).

17 See B. Badie (1999).

18 Among others, I. Wallerstein (1991).

19 For an introduction to this scientiﬁc discussion, E. D. Mansﬁeld and H. V Milner (1997);

Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell (1995); W. Coleman and G. Underhill (1998), D. A.

Lake and P. M. Morgan (1997).

20 K. Ohmae (1993) The Rise of the Region State, in

Foreign Affairs, n. 78, Spring.

21 S. Latouche (1998).

22 S. Amin (1997).

23 J. Gray (1998).

24 P. Hirst and G. Thompson (1996).

25 According to Gamble’s chapter, regionalism is also a state project, a system of policies,

just like globalism is a policy of a certain political authority, whereas ‘regionalization

and globalization are complex processes of social change’. On the political origins of

globalization, see D. A. Lake, Global Governance, in A. Prakash and J. A. Hart (1999)

pp: 32–51. Planispheres 2 and 3 show different global strategies towards regionalism

(see Appendix). See the chapter by Padoan.

26 L. C. Thurow (1992).

27 C. Crouch and W. Streeck (1997), Introduction. The Future of Capitalist Diversity, pp.

1–18.

28 H. Bull (1977) and S. Strange (1996)

29 G. Majone (1997) From the Positive to Regulatory State, in

Journal of Public Policy,

17/2, pp. 139–67. For the concept of ‘regulatory regionalism’, see the chapter by R.

Higgott.

30 R. Cox ed. (1997); Prakash and Hart (1999), Ruggie (1998).

31 M. Olson (1965).

32 S. Huntington (1996) pp. 122–49 and the theoretical debate, which follows in

Foreign

Affairs. See also B. R. Barber (1995) and the literature quoted by Th Meyer.

33 L. Fawcett and A. Hurrell, eds. (1995) Conclusion, pp. 309–27.

34 The concept of a ‘shared sense of communal identity’ has been proposed by C. A.

Kupchan, Regionalizing Europe’s Security, in E. Mansﬁeld and H. Milner (1997). On

‘cognitive regionalism’ see the chapter by R. Higgott.

35 For a brilliant analysis of the differences between these approaches and the traditional

‘rational choice institutionalism’, see Vivien A. Schmidt, ‘Comparative Institutional

Analysis’, in T. Landmann and N. Robinson (eds)

Handbook of Comparative Politics

(Sage, forthcoming).

PART I

Theoretical Perspectives

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Chapter 1

Regional Blocs, World Order

and the New Medievalism

Andrew Gamble

The end of the Cold War and the reuniﬁcation of the world economy have fuelled

debate on the future shape of world order. Many of the changes that have taken

place since then appear contradictory. There has been a marked trend towards

globalization and the creation of a more interconnected world economy and world

society. This has often been associated with the erosion of the power of nation

states to govern their economies, and the rise of new forms and agencies of global

governance. At the same time there has been a substantial regionalization of

economic activity and the strengthening of regionalist projects launched by core

states or groups of states. The hopes that had been brieﬂy expressed after 1991 for

a new world order which would transcend the conﬂicts of the past were dashed

after the events of 9/11 brought awareness of new perils and new insecurities, and

the application by the United States and its allies of a new security doctrine and the

declaration of a new kind of war, a war on terror.

This chapter examines four different futures for world order, based on contrasting

perspectives on the forces which are currently shaping it. These are:

Borderless world – a cosmopolitan global economy, in which states wither

away, and a benign global governance is instituted through markets and

democracy

Regional blocs – division of the world into protectionist spheres of inﬂuence

and rival civilizations controlled by a few great powers

American Empire – a world dominated by a unilateralist United States

New medievalism – a world in which there is no single source of legitimacy,

but a complex set of levels and networks and jurisdictions shaping governance

and identities.

1 Borderless world

The lack of agreement on the present nature of world order is a sign that a

fundamental change is taking place in the way in which the world is ordered, but

that we lack an adequate language to describe what is going on or to identify the

new principles (Gamble, 2000). The old images and concepts remain powerful

and seductive, none more so than the conventional international relations view of

•

European Union and New Regionalism

international politics as relations between states. However imperfectly the basic

principle of the modern state system may have been realized in practice since it

was enunciated in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, it has provided the dominant

perspective on international politics for 350 years. This basic principle is the claim

of supreme authority over a given territory. All local, particular and personal sources

of authority are consolidated into a single public power within a deﬁned territorial

space. This public power has two key spatial dimensions: the boundary between

the public and the private, and the boundary between the internal and the external

(Ruggie, 1993). This principle of territorial sovereignty depended on the repudiation

of those existing universal forms of religious and political authority which denied

it. The new doctrines claiming exclusive sovereignty for the prince over all matters

within a territory, including its religious afﬁliation (cuius regio eius religio and

rex in regno suo est imperator regni suo) did not go uncontested, but they were

increasingly in the ascendancy from the sixteenth century onwards. They helped

justify the dividing up of the world into states which claimed absolute sovereignty

over the territory they controlled, recognizing no superior jurisdiction.

1.1 Globalization

This way of conceiving the international state system has had to be rethought

because the idea of territorial sovereignty no longer captures the contemporary

nature of political rule (Ruggie, 1993). The rethinking has been gathering pace since

the 1970s as more and more changes appeared which did not ﬁt easily within the

assumptions of the Westphalian perspective. It has produced an extensive literature

around the new trends of globalization and regionalization, raising the question of

whether the era of the nation state is ﬁnally over. The nation state has been declared

an anachronism, facing forces which it can no longer control. A global economy is

emerging, dominated by new actors, such as transnational companies, banks and

NGOs. States are increasingly subordinate and reactive.

Yet globalization, as many have recognized, is not a new theory. Global economic

forces and global markets have existed since the emergence of capitalism. In The

Communist Manifesto 150 years ago, Marx put forward one of the earliest and

boldest theories of globalization, and he has been followed by many later writers,

most recently world system theorists (Wallerstein, 1974, 1984). World systems

theory emphasizes the contradictory character of the world system as a (relatively)

uniﬁed economy and a (relatively) fragmented polity. For theorists of globalization

the world economy is best characterized as a global rather than an international

economy. An international economy is made up of separate national economies,

controlled to a greater or lesser extent by states. Nation states are at the centre of

this world. They derive their legitimacy and their power from their control over

discrete national territories, populations and resources. Flows of goods, people and

capital have to be sanctioned by political authority.

A global economy, by contrast, is one in which the fundamental units are not

nation states and national economies but patterns of production and consumption

organized by transnational companies, operating across national borders, and not

reliant on any particular national territory or government. Economic decisions are

shaped not at the level of national governments but through the workings of the

Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism 23

global ﬁnancial markets and the patterns of international trade and production.

Governments have to adjust their societies and economies to the changing

requirements of the global economy, or risk impoverishment and isolation.

1.2 Hyper-globalization

The tendencies towards the creation of a global economy have existed since the

beginning of capitalism, but they have been stronger in some periods than others. Since

the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 the balance between transnational

economic forces and national governments moved in favour of the former. The

international state system and the principle of order which it embodied came under

severe strain. Supporters and critics of the new global economy have argued that in

this changed environment national governments lose their autonomy and become

ciphers for global economic forces. A new cosmopolitan society emerges, uniﬁed

around a single set of political, social, economic and ideological principles, in which

there is no room for fundamental alternatives. History has ended (Fukuyama, 1992).

Strong versions of globalization (or hyper-globalization, as it is sometimes

called) claim that borders are becoming obsolete. The nation state is no longer an

appropriate unit of analysis or agent of governance because economic activity in

the global economy no longer coincides with political or cultural boundary lines

(Ohmae, 1995). Yet the nation state, although increasingly irrelevant, can still

obstruct the development of the global economy. It uses its centralized powers

to raise taxes and redistribute resources according to the pressures of special

interests. The result is a cumbersome, inefﬁcient bureaucracy which makes national

government the enemy of the wider public interest in maximizing the conditions for

prosperity and growth. The enthusiasts for hyper-globalization want the powers of

the nation state to be dismantled and the growth of region states encouraged. Region

states are ports of entry to the global economy, typically urban conglomerates and

their hinterlands, with populations of between 5 million and 20 million people;

their borders are deﬁned economically, rather than politically. They depend on the

existence of resources and skills which are located close together, but not necessarily

within a single national jurisdiction. Competitiveness is determined at the level of

sectors and ﬁrms, not at the level of the national economy. The key policy issue

is whether national governments have the will and ability to embrace the global

economy and resist pressure for national policies of protection and subsidy. The

only role for governments is to become market states (Bobbitt, 2002) and facilitate

the globalization of their national economies. By doing so, they bring nearer the

nineteenth-century dream of a global cosmopolitan society which is coordinated

and managed without the need for politics, and in which national attachments have

become insigniﬁcant.

1.3 Critics of neo-liberalism

The globalization thesis does point to some important and real changes which

have been taking place in the world economy and have led to a weakening of

nation states and an erosion of their sovereignty, but critics argue that at least

in its hyperglobalist form it is exaggerated. There is little evidence that a global

European Union and New Regionalism

economy is emerging which overrides the modes of governance organized through

nation states and exists independently of them (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Global

economic forces and global markets are always embedded in governance, both state

and non-state (Peters and Pierre, 2000). Forms of governance have been changing,

but the global markets themselves lack the capacity to supply their own internal

mechanisms of governance.

In discussing globalization it is important to distinguish between, ﬁrst, the trends

which are extending and deepening connections of many different kinds (Perraton

et al., 1997), and second, the normative political project, globalism, better known

perhaps as neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2003), which promotes particular policies while

ruling out alternatives. Globalization rhetoric has been increasingly adopted by

state elites to justify substantial changes in domestic policies, particularly on public

spending, welfare and industrial intervention (Hay and Marsh, 2001). But how

constrained are national policies? Even if some of the changes which globalization

highlights have altered the limits within which national governments may act, some

argue that at most it has changed the menu of policies from which governments have

to choose, rather than the ability to choose itself (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). From

this perspective states still operate in an international rather than a global economy.

2 Regional blocs

The second perspective starts from this claim, that the new global economy has

regional and national foundations (Zysman, 1996). Politics and the state remain

of vital importance to the way in which the global economy develops and to the

institutional and cultural variety within it. Far from globalization sweeping away all

political structures, it is creating new ones. The political response to globalization

has been the setting up of new structures and new projects. The emerging economic

geography is regional rather than global, and a distinctive aspect of the emerging

world order is the creation or consolidation of regionalist projects (NAFTA in the

Americas, the EU in Europe and ASEAN in Southeast Asia).

The existence of these regionalist projects is clear enough, although they are

very different from one another (Gamble and Payne, 1996; Hettne and Soderbaum,

1998; Breslin and Higgott, 2000). A key theoretical and practical question is

what they signify. Are they compatible with globalization, even steps towards it,

or do they foreshadow a turn away from the cosmopolitan world economy and a

return to closed, antagonistic regional blocs? The latter view has its roots in realist

perspectives in international relations, both liberal and Marxist. At its heart is a

pessimistic assessment of the workings of the international state system. Left to

themselves, states will be single-minded and ruthless in the pursuit of their security;

the normal state of international relations is conﬂict.

2.1 The inter-war crisis

This is not a new view. Writing in the 1940s, E. H. Carr analyzed how the world

order sustained by British hegemony in the nineteenth century had fallen apart in

the twentieth. Carr described this world order as ‘the golden age of continuously

Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism 25

expanding territories and markets, of a world policed by the self-assured and not

too onerous British hegemony, of a coherent ‘western civilization’ whose conﬂicts

could be harmonized by a progressive extension of the area of common development

and exploitation’ (Carr, 1946: 224). The First World War had shattered this world

beyond repair. During the 1920s there was a tendency towards disintegration and

fragmentation of larger political units, particularly in Europe, but this was quickly

followed by the reorganization of the world into a system of regional blocs:

The more autarky is regarded as the goal, the larger the units must become. The United

States strengthened their hold over the American continents. Great Britain created a

sterling bloc and laid the foundations of a closed economic system. Germany reconstituted

Mittel-Europa and pressed forward into the Balkans. Soviet Russia developed its vast

territories into a compact unit of industrial and agricultural production. Japan attempted

the creation of a new unit of ‘Eastern Asia’ under Japanese domination. Such was the

trend towards the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of six or

seven highly organized units, round which lesser satellite units revolved without any

appreciable independent motion of their own. (Carr, 1946: 230)

Carr analyzed the trend towards regional blocs in terms of power politics,

distinguishing between military, economic and ideological forms of power, and

interpreted world politics as a struggle for power between rival states. Classical

Marxism reached similar conclusions in its analysis of the formation of regional

blocs in the 1930s (Sweezy, 1942; Brewer, 1990).

2.2 Hegemonic breakdown

One of the implications of Carr’s analysis was that the breakdown of the world

order in the 1930s and the formation of regional blocs followed inevitably from

the collapse of British hegemony. This argument became the main theme of the

hegemonic stability school which developed in the 1970s. The Great Depression in

the 1930s was explained by the lack of a state capable of providing world leadership

(Kindleberger, 1973). The institutions of the liberal world order collapsed because

of the inability of Britain to continue to play the role of hegemon and supply the

public goods necessary to stabilize the global economy, and because of the absence

of any other power able or willing to ﬁll that role. The Second World War created

the conditions for the emergence of a new hegemon, the United States, which

produced the successful reconstruction of the world economy and the long period

of prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. But the gradual erosion of the economic

supremacy of the United States meant that its hegemonic power began to decline in

the 1970s, and it was no longer able to guarantee the conditions for a stable liberal

world order. The results were the recessions and economic instability of the 1970s

and 1980s. If no power is able to supply the public goods which a liberal world

order requires then states will respond with mercantilist and protectionist policies,

as they did in the 1930s. Many observers in the 1930s concluded at that time that

the future belonged to national economies and regional blocs.

One of the characteristics of regional bloc scenarios in the ﬁrst half of the

twentieth century and again today is that the nature of the conﬂict between the

European Union and New Regionalism

blocs is assumed to be a zero-sum game in which each bloc competes to increase its

relative share of territory, resources and wealth within a global total which is ﬁxed.

In this neo-realist perspective regionalism simpliﬁes and intensiﬁes this conﬂict, by

combining the most important states into more or less cohesive groups under the

leadership of the dominant state in each region. The pressure on a region to become

cohesive increases in relation to the success of other regions in unifying themselves.

As each regional power seeks to maximize its wealth and extend its territory, the

risk of economic wars rises, because in a zero-sum world each regional power

calculates that conﬂict will yield more beneﬁt than cooperation.

2.3 Critics of regional blocs

Gloomy forebodings of economic wars and holy wars (Huntington, 1993) have

reappeared in the last ten years; but they are challenged by other scenarios which

predict a future of increasing prosperity and peace, the settling of the ideological

conﬂicts which have dominated world politics for 200 years and the universal

acceptance of a common set of ideas about economic and social organization

associated with the idea of a cosmopolitan global economy. On this view the clash

of civilizations predicted by Huntington will not materialize because there is only

one civilization – Western civilization – which is adapted for survival. The ethic of

ultimate ends contained in Confucianism, Islam and Christianity all belong to the

pre-modern stage of social development, and are destined to be left behind.

Liberal institutionalists further argue that as the world economy becomes more

interdependent, it becomes rational for states to prefer cooperation to conﬂict

(Keohane, 1984). States increasingly face common problems which can only be

handled through agreement on new institutions and rules. As interdependence

deepens, so the risk of major economic or military conﬂict should decline.

Democracies do not ﬁght one another, so as democratization spreads, the less likely

it becomes that conﬂicts between states will be settled in the future by resort to arms.

New transnational institutions develop to mediate conﬂicts. These theories reject

the assumption that states face a zero-sum game. Instead, they assume that there

is a positive-sum game in which states can cooperate either through competition

or through intergovernmental negotiation to increase the total output of goods and

services available for distribution. Economic welfare can be improved for everyone

so long as positional goods such as territory and resources do not become the focus

of competition. An earlier Marxist version of this argument can be found in the

theories of ultra-imperialism, the peaceful joint exploitation of the world by the

united ﬁnance capital of the great powers (Brewer, 1990).

2.4 Regionalism and globalization

If the world is not facing a return to regional blocs, what explains the recent growth

of regionalism and how far is it compatible with globalization? One of the problems

is the different levels of analysis at which these concepts operate. Regionalism

is a type of state project which can be distinguished from other types of state

project such as globalism. Globalization and regionalization are not state projects

Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism 27

but complex processes of social change which involve distinctive new patterns

of social interaction between non-state actors (Gamble and Payne, 1996). State

projects like regionalism typically seek to accelerate, to modify, or occasionally

to reverse the direction of social change which processes like globalization and

regionalization represent.

In practice, regionalism as a set of state projects intersects with globalization.

The relationship between the two has come into particularly sharp focus with the

end of the Cold War. The global economy in the 1990s developed not two but

three cores: North America, the European Union and East Asia. The former core

around the Soviet Union has disintegrated, allowing the three embryonic cores

within the former capitalist world economy to emerge as the constituent elements

of the new order, each with its own regionalist project. The relationships between

these three cores and between the cores and their peripheries is both complex and

diverse. No single pattern has become established. What they all share, however,

is a commitment to open regionalism; policy is directed towards the elimination

of obstacles to trade within a region, while at the same time minimizing trade

barriers to the rest of the world. Policy debate has been conducted not between

advocates of free trade and of protection, but between advocates of free trade and

of strategic trade. The strategic traders have argued that maintaining and improving

international competitiveness needs to be the central goal of economic policy.

Instead of insulating the economy from foreign competition, the aim is to expose

it to competition while at the same time ensuring that it is able to meet it. Strategic

trade arguments deny free trade arguments that an optimum specialization of labour

dictated by comparative advantage will arise spontaneously. Rather, states must

act strategically to protect key sectors and ensure that they become international

leaders in those areas (Reich, 1991; Thurow, 1992).

All the current regionalist projects, even NAFTA, have been driven to some

extent by a strategic trade view. One of the beneﬁts of greater regional cooperation

has been the possibility of enabling regional companies and sectors to be successful

in global markets. The emphasis is placed on training, research, investment, public

procurement and infrastructure, and the need to maintain legal and managerial

control over ﬁrms. Strategic trade assumptions have always been important in

some states, but they have become more prominent recently. Free traders regard

them as a diversion from the task of building a non-discriminatory open world

trading system, and dispute claims that states are equipped to plan strategically in

the way that companies attempt to do (Krugman, 1994; Wolf, 2005).

The strategic trade argument has also inﬂuenced the models of capitalism

literature which argues that there are distinctive models of capitalism that are

regionally or nationally speciﬁc (Albert, 1991). The dominant Anglo-American

model, with its emphasis on free trade, arm’s-length banking and a laissez-faire

policy regime, contrasts with the Japanese and Rhenish models, which emphasize

strategic trade, long-term investment, and corporatist and partnership modes of

corporate governance and policy formation. Such models, however, are ideal types.

Although there are some signiﬁcant differences between national institutional

patterns which give rise to competing strategies for coping with competitive

pressures in the global economy, they are easily exaggerated. Strategic trade