Telo M. European Union and New Regionalism. Regional Actors and Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era
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European Union and New Regionalism
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considerations, for example, have always been important in some sectors of the
United States, particularly defence, while some sectors in Europe and Japan have
been governed entirely by the rules of free trade. More recently the idea of national
models has been further challenged by the Varieties of Capitalism approach,
which seeks the source of variation at the level of companies and sectors (Hall and
Soskice, 2001).
The new regionalism is contained within quite narrow ideological parameters,
reflecting the continuing ideological and cultural leadership of the United States. The
competition between models or varieties of capitalism of the last twenty years is
much less fundamental than the earlier conflict between national capitalisms. Charles
Maier, for example, has argued: ‘Viewed over the whole half century the American
international economic effort of the era of stabilization centred on overcoming
British, Japanese, and especially German alternatives to a pluralist, market-economy
liberalism’ (Maier, 1987: 1183). That battle was won, and although important
differences remain, they do so within a shared set of neo-liberal assumptions. One of
the forces driving current regionalist projects is an attempt to protect what survives of
different models of economic and cultural organization. A limited regionalism which
does promote some diversity within the capitalist world has been the result.
3 American empire
The third perspective does not accept that the growth of new regionalism in recent
years indicates that the US is in decline or that the world is fragmenting into
regional blocs. Instead it sees a world in which the US is currently extending its
power and transforming itself into an Empire (Rapkin, 2005; Cox, 2004). The huge
military preponderance of the US since the demise of the Soviet Union means that
no other power is capable of challenging the US militarily, and the determination of
the US to maintain its global reach and a network of bases and dependent powers
in every continent is undimmed. By providing a security umbrella for its closest
allies, the US makes it unnecessary for those allies to acquire large military forces
themselves. The US intervenes in every continent to secure its basic geo-political
objectives, access to markets and resources, particularly oil. At the same time the
US continues to dominate the world economy through its financial power, and the
world-wide operations of its transnational companies, and its lead in many of the
new technologies of the latest phase of industrial development.
The US has acquired a position of dominance which many observers consider
exceptional in the international state system, because for fifteen years it has had
no serious rival. Japan has remained dependent upon the US for its security, while
the EU, although no longer dependent upon the US as it was during the Cold War,
has failed to develop an effective defence and security policy, and in particular
has failed to raise its military spending to anything like the US level. Although
relations between the US and the EU have therefore grown more distant in the
recent past, particularly during the Iraq war, the EU is not seen in Washington as
a serious rival to the US, more as an irritant, and even then many EU states have
continued to collaborate with the US through NATO on issues of common concern.
Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism 29
New powers such as India and China have the potential eventually to rival the US,
but it will not happen quickly, and in the meantime the US continues to dominate
the international state system, acting unilaterally and without consent, as in Iraq,
whenever it judges one of its vital geo-political interests is threatened. It has begun
to act much more as an imperial rather than a hegemonic power, and some observers
have found this praiseworthy, and indeed urged the US to go further and openly
proclaim its imperial mission (Ferguson, 2004).
3.1 Critics of empire
Popular though the designation of the US as a new empire has become, particularly
following the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives in Washington, the elaboration
of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive action, the declaration of an axis of evil, and
the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. But there have always been powerful sceptics
of the idea that the US is a new empire or if it is that it can sustain itself as one.
Firstly, the US is an incoherent empire. It lacks many of the capacities it would
need to be a truly effective imperial power (Mann, 2003). Secondly, a long-lasting
empire requires the ability to impose direct territorial rule and imperial jurisdiction.
The Americans have always been good at going in but have rarely stayed. The
number of territories permanently administered by the US is not increasing. The
US continues to be torn between an imperial and a hegemonic logic, as Britain once
was, and the hegemonic logic is still extremely powerful – preserving a rules-based
multilateral regime for the ordering of the international state system and the global
economy (Ikenberry, 2004). This has often involved the use of military force, but it
has not involved permanent US occupation of territory. This makes the US a very
different kind of empire from those in the past. Finally the US may be supreme in
the military sphere (although even this supremacy has its limits as the difficulties
the Americans have encountered in subduing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan
demonstrates). But it is far from supreme in other areas, and is unable to impose its
will, but must work through coalitions, negotiation and compromise. These areas
include the global economy, where the US cannot dictate in areas like trade, but
must bargain with the EU, Japan, and new groupings involving India, China and
Brazil. US trade and budget deficits also indicate a long-term structural weakness,
of the kind which heralded British decline in the past. Other crucial areas include
all those issues which arise from the interdependence of the global economy and
global civil society – such as climate change, pollution, drugs, crime and terrorism
(Nye, 2002). The idea that a unilateralist America can impose its own solutions
to these problems looks fanciful. The return at some stage to more consensual,
multilateralist approaches seems inevitable.
4 New medievalism
All three perspectives so far seem inadequate in various ways to grasp the
implications of globalization and regionalization for the changing shape of world
order. An alternative approach is new medievalism, a term first employed by
Hedley Bull (1977). New medievalism is best thought of as a metaphor which
European Union and New Regionalism
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draws attention to some similarities between contemporary developments and
certain features of the medieval political system in Europe. No one suggests that
there could be a return to the medieval era. Rather what the concept highlights is
whether the principle of exclusive territorial sovereignty so typical of the modern
era will turn out to be a unique and aberrant phase in political development (Kobrin,
1996). New medievalism involves contrasting the modern with the medieval state
system and arguing that some of the features of the latter are becoming salient
again (Tanaka, 1996).
The fundamental aspect of old medievalism in Europe was that there was no
ruler with supreme authority over a particular territory or a particular population.
Authority was always shared: downwards with vassals, upwards with the Pope –
and, in Germany and Italy, with the Holy Roman Emperor. The source of authority
was religious, not secular; it was derived from God. The medieval system was
theocratic, and this gave it its unity. In 1400 European Christendom still thought of
itself as one society (Mattingley, 1964). Authority was multiple and boundaries were
overlapping. No centre of universal competence was recognized. There were three
separate systems of law – canon law, customary law and civil law – based on three
different traditions – Christian, German and Roman – making the administration
of justice complex. Political authority was organized through elaborate hierarchies,
a chain of dependent tenures and fiefs. Such interlocking relationships promoted
stability because sovereignty was distributed not concentrated, with the functions
of the state split up and assigned to different levels and locations, such as manors
and cities. All this made the centre extremely weak. Monarchs were not supreme
authorities ruling their subjects as they subsequently strove to do. They had to
rely for financial resources on their own personal domains. Their vassals owed
them military service but not taxes, while the existence of the vassals and their
local authority meant that monarchs had no way of communicating directly with
the whole population. The absence of a mechanism to integrate and consolidate
authority at the centre of the feudal system posed a permanent threat to its stability
and survival, and made conflict endemic (Anderson, 1974).
Critics of the idea of a new medievalism point to major differences between the
medieval and the contemporary world order. Firstly, European medievalism was
only one, local, political and cultural order in the world at that time. In place of the
separate and largely self-sufficient civilizations of this period there now exists an
increasingly interdependent global system, and Europe and East Asia, for example,
are interdependent parts of this system rather than separate worlds. Secondly, there
is no theocratic basis to the modern state system, except for a few Islamic states,
and no universal doctrine in the way that Christianity was a universal doctrine
for Europe, although neo-liberalism has pretensions in this direction. Thirdly, the
Westphalian system of discrete territorial sovereignties is still strong; indeed, in
some respects, with the creation of many new nation states following the breakup
of the Soviet Union, it has grown stronger. The modern conception of the public
power as the capacity to create new laws and impose obedience to them has been
challenged and weakened in some areas, but remains intact in others, and is even
being strengthened (Anderson and Goodman, 1995).
But there is still some value in the idea of a new medievalism. It focuses
attention on the implications of the evident weakening of states in the last twenty-
Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism 31
five years, which have seen boundaries become blurred and the source of authority
less distinct. States have been obliged to share authority with other actors, and
their ability to command the exclusive loyalty of their citizens in some areas has
diminished. Hedley Bull identified five major trends which gave support to the idea
of a new medievalism, all of which have grown in importance since he wrote.
Regional integration – the European Community (EC) being the most
prominent example at that time. Bull speculated as to whether the EC was
developing into a new super state, in which case it would not disturb the
traditional international state system, or whether it was a new hybrid, in which
sovereignty would be shared between the Community and the member states
indefinitely, producing perpetual uncertainty about where sovereignty was
located. Bull here anticipated the more recent discussion of the European
Union as a new type of political system, the first post-modern state (Ruggie,
1993; Anderson and Goodman, 1995; Telo, 2005).
Disintegration of existing states – principally as a result of new secessionist
movements (Nairn, 1981). Again, Bull noted that this trend would be of
significance for new medievalism only if the disintegration stopped short of
the creation of new states. In that case, the basic principles of the Westphalian
system would be upheld, not denied. Of interest to the perspective of new
medievalism is the intermediate stage, in which existing sovereignty is
questioned but new sovereignty is not fully asserted, creating uncertainty as
to where sovereignty is actually located, as well as the increasing number of
‘failed states’ (Fukuyama, 2005).
Revival of private international violence – Bull was thinking primarily of
the growth of international terrorism, but others have also talked about the
spread of disorder, corruption, business mafias and private violence more
generally. One of the crucial aspects of territorial sovereignty was the
claim to monopoly of the means of coercion. Only states were recognized
as having legitimacy to wage war or to coerce their citizens. States have
not lost this legitimacy, but in some areas their ability to enforce their
claims to a monopoly of the means of violence has weakened. The growth
of international terror organizations equipped with new techniques and
strategies is one example (Hoge and Rose, 2005).
Growth of transnational organizations – Bull detected an explosion in such
organizations, ranging from companies, political movements and religious
associations to international and intergovernmental agencies. He argued
that every organization should be classified as national, multinational or
transnational in terms of three dimensions: who controlled it, its personnel
and the geographical scope of its operations. The increasing number of
organizations defined as transnational in terms of all three criteria suggested
a growing divide between a geocentric technology and an ethnocentric
politics. The nation state could still be considered strong in certain areas,
such as the deployment of military forces and the ability to command the
loyalty of citizens, but transnational civil society has been growing in
importance (Scholte, 2005).
•
•
•
•
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Technological unification of the world – particularly in communications,
transport and cultural networks, captured in ideas such as the global village.
As Bull pointed out, a better term is global city, since this way of life –
nervous, tense, agitated and fragmented – is more characteristic of urban
than of village life. The emergence of new economic and cultural spaces
which are global rather than national is another potential challenge to the
state system and its authority, because it allows citizens to escape its control
(Rosenau, 1990). But even here many spaces remain obstinately national
and local.
4.1 Multi-level systems of authority
Although Hedley Bull was sceptical as to how far any of these trends would actually
lead to permanent changes in the international state system, the metaphor of new
medievalism has proved powerful, and its relevance has if anything increased
in recent years. Susan Strange’s observation that the world is beginning to look
more like the European middle ages with multi-level systems of authority than the
Westphalian system of territorial sovereignty, has been developed by Robert Cox
(Cox, 1996), who has enumerated a number of ways in which this is true. Cities
are once again meaningful centres of global interaction and exchange. Provinces
and sub-national regions are achieving autonomy as states lose efficiency. Macro-
regions are taking on some of the roles performed by states. The loyalty of
companies is now multiple rather than unique, and a new global consumerism is
being established which promulgates universal norms of economic and political
conduct and assists the convergence of tastes and hierarchies of values.
These trends lead to the emergence of a new world order which is characterized
by a multi-level structure and the breakup of the old state system. The new order is
a complex structure of political–economic entities: micro-regions, traditional states
and macro-regions with institutions of greater or lesser functional scope and formal
authority, and world cities. The development of this new order poses a fundamental
challenge to the old system because it sets up rival transnational processes of
ideological formation as well as institutions for concertation and coordination, and
multilateral processes for conflict management, peacekeeping and regulation. States
are involved in these processes, but not always as the dominant agents (Scholte,
2005; Cerny, 1990).
This new world order exacerbates the conflict which has always existed in the
world system between the principles of interdependence and territorial sovereignty.
Interdependence is non-territorial, and is characterized by competition in the
world market, global finance unconstrained by territorial boundaries, and global
production. The territorial principle is state-based and grounded in military and
political power. For Cox, one has not risen at the expense of the other. The two
principles define the nature of the modern world order and there is a perpetual
tension between them.
•
Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism 33
4.2 Unbundled territoriality
John Ruggie has taken the idea of new medievalism one stage further by arguing
that the term is useful if it helps us to understand that we are living through a
major transition as significant as the one between the medieval and the modern
eras. The inability of many theorists, journalists and politicians to understand the
EU is attributable to its being the first post-modern international political form.
It is neither national nor supranational; instead, there are overlapping layers of
economic and political space. Ruggie strongly attacks neo-realists who argue that
unless the EU becomes a unified state it has no real significance in the international
state system, and that since it was primarily a by-product of the superpower conflict,
the disappearance of that conflict has removed its rationale. What this ignores is the
growth of new institutions, new jurisdictions and new spaces which signal a new
form of political rule which cannot be fitted into the old categories.
Ruggie accepts the arguments of Jameson and Harvey that it is not just the
international state system which is in crisis but modernity itself. Capitalism is
moving into its third great phase of expansion. The first was the national market;
the second was the imperial system; and the current phase is the production and
manipulation of signs, images and information (Jameson, 1984, 1989). Central
to this new phase of capitalism is the reconfiguration of space–time experiences,
the first major upheaval since the Renaissance (Harvey, 1989). The experiences,
Ruggie argues, have changed; but the perceptual equipment is lacking to make
sense of them. Crucial to the concept of space in the modern era was single-point
perspective, developed by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1425. Its original application
was in painting, but it came to influence the form of all intellectual enquiry. In
international relations it helped shape the concept of sovereignty, the viewing of all
political relations from a single fixed point.
The specific spatial and temporal coordinates of modernity have been overturned
by what Ruggie, following Halford Mackinder, terms the spatial and temporal
implosion of the globe. Mackinder, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century,
declared that the age of Columbus (the age of European expansion) was over and
predicted the emergence of a unified post-Columbian world system (Mackinder,
1904). The Bolshevik revolution delayed that outcome for seventy-five years, but
with the collapse of the USSR there is now no major barrier to the integration of
all territories and states into a single world system. The ideology of globalization
is a reflection of that.
This new stage in the development of the world system will be characterized,
Ruggie argues, by a new system of rule of which the EU is the first harbinger.
The basis on which the international political system is segmented into units and
spaces is changing. The old mode of differentiation – territorial sovereignty – is
being ‘unbundled’ by the globalization of the economy and culture. Instead of one
perspective there are now multiple perspectives, and instead of one identity there
are multiple identities. It is impossible to grasp the contours of this world with the
categories of modernity. In this sense the intellectual perspective which is required
is one closer to that of medieval times in Europe than of the modern period.
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4.3 The future of the nation state
There remains an uneasiness about using the concept of new medievalism. Contrasts
between old and new medievalism often seem much greater than the similarities.
At the time of the European middle ages the world system was not unified and
interdependent in the way that it is now; the extent of the division of labour and of
interdependence was low. It was a period before the monopolization of government
functions by sovereign nation states (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). The extent of
the integration of modern economies and societies means that no return to that
earlier era is possible. Nor is there anything comparable in the contemporary world
system to the universal doctrine of Christianity. A new secular universal doctrine
embracing human rights and environmentalism has begun to be elaborated, but it
is a long way from enjoying the authority that Christianity enjoyed in medieval
Europe. Other features of medieval universalism, such as a common elite language,
are also less developed. Further criticisms focus on the extent to which nation
states have actually been weakened. In some areas state powers have increased
(Anderson and Goodman, 1995). The unbundling of territoriality is therefore only
partial. Distinctions have to be made between the different roles which states
perform. In security, defence and welfare, nation states’ loss of sovereignty is much
less marked than in economic policy.
New medievalism does focus attention on systems of rule, which globalization
does not. But the conditions for rule in the contemporary world system are clearly
vastly different from those prevailing in the European middle ages. Different modes
of governance – markets, hierarchies, networks and communities – are required to
sustain and coordinate such a complex global division of labour and organize the
distribution of work and income among sectors, regions, classes and households.
A politics-free cosmopolitan society is a fantasy. What is required are new forms
of governance to handle the increasingly serious problems of the world system
– population pressure, climate change, environmental sustainability, global poverty
and ethnic conflict (Held, 1995, 2004; Gamble, 1993, 2000).
The authority and the competence of nation states have undoubtedly been
weakened in certain areas in the last twenty-five years. The nation state is on the
defensive against a world economy it cannot control, and against institutions such as
the EU which it originally constructed to remedy its own weaknesses. It has suffered
a loss of will and capacity. It can no longer financially maintain the public services
which were so confidently established only a few decades ago; nor can it maintain
public law and order (Hobsbawm, 1994). Not all states in all parts of the world suffer
the same incapacity and incompetence. But the nation state does appear weak in
relation to many of the problems it faces. The paradox is that it is still indispensable
within the governance structure of the world system (Pierre and Peters, 2000).
The key test of the thesis of new medievalism is whether this weakness of the
nation state is transient or permanent. If the factors which cause it are transient then
the nation state may re-emerge with enhanced powers and legitimacy. If they are
permanent – as most analysts suspect – then the nation state might just wither away
as some neo-liberals hope, or, more probably, it might, as the new medievalism thesis
suggests, be gradually changed into one of several overlapping areas of governance
(Bache and Flinders, 2004). One of the causes of the weakness of the state is that
Regional Blocs, World Order and the New Medievalism 35
the era of national protectionism has ended, an era which enhanced the powers of
national government and gave meaning to the concept of a national economy as an
object of public policy. The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed a reconfiguration of
the relationships between states and the global economy, with the emergence of new
regions and speculation about regional blocs. As yet, the trend towards the formation
of regional blocs remains weak, certainly compared with the 1920s and 1930s, and
the new forms of regional political structures that have been established are more in
tune with the governance mechanisms of the new medievalism than with those of the
old international state system (Hettne and Soderbaum, 1998).
4.4 Reregulating the economy
New medievalism is consistent with different scenarios for the future of world order.
Robert Cox has speculated that we may be witnessing a new phase in the alternation
between deregulation and reregulation (Cox, 1996). Karl Polanyi argued that the
conscious deregulation of the nineteenth century meant overreliance upon the market
as the mode of governance (Polanyi, 1944). The state was steadily withdrawn from
direct involvement in economic activity and was confined to the role of enforcing the
rules of the market. Once established, markets were regarded as self-regulating. The
consequences of self-regulating markets, however, were so socially destructive that
resistance multiplied and the nation state found a new legitimacy as the regulator of
the economy and the guarantor of minimum levels of welfare.
Polanyi expected that this would be irreversible, but it has not proved so. The
regulated system lost legitimacy in the 1970s because it was unable to cope with
the problems of accelerating inflation, decelerating growth and the consequent
tendency for public spending to outpace revenues. At the same time, it had to deal
with the emergence of an increasingly global economy, manifested particularly
in the financial markets. As a result, in the last thirty years there has been a
pronounced swing away from regulation and new experiments with deregulation,
privatization and the dismantling of public sectors and public programmes have
proliferated, particularly in Britain and the United States. Neo-liberal doctrines
of globalization have codified many of these policy ideas into dogmas which are
routinely expressed in the conditions for financial assistance imposed on national
governments by international agencies like the IMF and the World Bank.
Cox asks whether the same pressures that led to the imposition of social
control in the nineteenth century will develop again, as a result of the increasingly
destructive nature of neo-liberal policies and the self-regulating market throughout
the world system. This time, however, control would need to be reimposed not at the
national level but at the global level. The practical difficulties in the way of such a
development are immense, since the conditions for world government are nowhere
fulfilled, and the systems of rule within the world system remain so fragmented.
Nevertheless, pressure for some form of reregulation is growing as problems and
perils accumulate. But such reregulation, if it occurs, is likely to strengthen rather
than replace the multi-level system of authority that now defines the international
state system, rebalancing the various modes of governing the global economy, and
thus privileging certain national strategies and institutional patterns over others.
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5 Conclusion
‘New medievalism’ is at best a metaphor but, used properly, it can provide insights
into the changing forms of governance of the world system. One of the key tests for
this perspective is whether the EU is a peculiar and unique phenomenon, as peculiar
and unique as the Holy Roman Empire, or whether it is the first embodiment of a
new form of political rule which might be a model for other regionalisms (Telò,
2005); or whether it is embryonically a new unified regional bloc, a United States
of Europe. Nationalist opponents of European integration still believe, despite
much evidence to the contrary, that it is the last of these. They want a return to
exclusive national sovereignty, but their critics believe that the rights of self-
determination which the nationalists seek can now only be achieved by recognizing
the fundamental changes in the way in which political, economic and social space
is now structured.
One of the paradoxes of the current debate is that there is a double movement.
On the one hand there are pronounced trends towards globalization in finance,
production and commerce. On the other, the legitimacy of the nation state as
the preferred locus of political rule has never been stronger, and many nations,
as in eastern Europe, still seek self-determination and the creation of their own
independent state. The fears about regionalist projects and the revival of fears about
the formation of blocs is in part the anxiety that the pluralism and overlapping
authorities so characteristic of the present time will not last, and that there will be
a swing back to unified centralized political authority.
The contrasts made between different periods are often oversimplified. Since
the world system began there have always been four types of order present:
cosmopolitan, organized around markets; imperial, organized around security;
hegemonic, organized around rules; and territorial, organized around legitimacy
and frontiers. Their relative weightings have changed in different periods, but they
have always coexisted. What we are witnessing today is a rebalancing of these types
of order. Realist conceptions of international relations for too long have obscured
the fact that there have always been rival and overlapping sources of authority and
order. There never was a pure Westphalian world. If new medievalism can help us
appreciate that fact, it will have served a useful purpose.
Chapter 2
The Political Economy of New
Regionalism and World Governance
Pier Carlo Padoan
After the breakdown of the Bretton Woods arrangement the international system
has been moving into a structure often referred to as unipolar, that is, characterized
by the presence of a single superpower, the United Stares – holding military and
economic power to impose unilateral choices on the rest of the system with no
other country or group of countries able to seriously challenge them. Over the
past few years, however, the distribution of power, especially economic power, has
been changing as new global players such as India, China, Russia, and Brazil have
shown economic and political dynamism as well as ambition to play a leading role
in world affairs. Long term projections place India’s and China’s GDP at levels
that could match those of the US in twenty years’ time. Irrespective of whether
such projections are accurate they show that the world is moving away from a
unipolar structure and will be increasingly characterized by a multipolar one. A
parallel and related phenomenon is the proliferation of limited agreements,
1
be they
regional or bilateral, which involve very diverse groups of countries. So, in spite of
increasingly integrated markets, a system of global governance is still not available.
This, however, does not mean that there is no governance of the global system. The
interaction between nation states, regional agreements, and the global dimension,
may well lead to the establishment of a system of governance which may provide
some form of international order. If and how this can take place remains one of the
main challenges in understanding global relations. Starting from this perspective,
the chapter seeks to offer suggestions on how to link the three levels of analysis:
national, regional, and global in the process of global governance. The discussion
will take a dual approach. The ‘top-down’ approach which considers the influence
the higher levels exert on the lower ones: how the globalization of the international
system affects the evolution of regional agreements, and how the latter influences
the domestic policies of nation states.
2
The ‘bottom-up’ approach which looks at
the opposite direction of influence: how the development of regional agreements
shape the characteristics of the new international system.
1 The global system in institutional disequilibrium
As it moves away form a unipolar structure the global system remains in what has
been called a post-hegemonic condition (Gilpin, 1987): that is, a situation in which
no single country can provide unilaterally the public goods required for the operation