The New Regionalism Revisited

Abstract

This chapter deals with the recent wave of regionalism and regionalization in the context of global transformation and competing world order projects which have the purpose of regulating a turbulent global condition. It builds and elaborates on results from a United Nations University/World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER) sponsored international research project on the New Regionalism, for which the author was the project director. The thrust of this project, which was carried out in the latter half of the 1990s, was to explore the role of the regional factor in the emerging world order. Under the assumption that this regional wave was qualitatively new and that there was a need for a more empirical exploration, the project used a broad comparative approach that came to be called the New Regionalism Approach (NRA). The overall purpose here is to move away from ‘region-centrisn’, which may be as limiting as state-centrism, the original sin for which the UNU/WIDER project was to be a cure. This strong concentration on the empirical regions must be understood against the background of the surprising explosion of regional initiatives starting in the mid-1980s in many parts of the world; and constituting a new wave of regionalization processes, or what was called ‘the new regionalism’. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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